Publications & Testimony

On December 15 the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights marked the 20^th anniver­sary of an inter­na­tion­al death penal­ty treaty by call­ing for the uni­ver­sal abo­li­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Navi Pillay, the top UN human rights offi­cial, urged all states to adopt the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The pro­to­col, which bars the death penal­ty, was intro­duced in 1989.

A recent edi­to­r­i­al in the Virginian-Pilot called for elim­i­nat­ing the death penal­ty as a good way to address the $3.5 bil­lion gap in the state’s bud­get.​“Doing away with the option of a death sen­tence makes sense on sev­er­al lev­els,” the edi­tors wrote.​“It would save the state from hav­ing to pay fees asso­ci­at­ed with lengthy tri­als and years of appeals. It would end the agony of repeat­ed court hear­ings for the fam­i­lies of vic­tims. It would elim­i­nate the four…

A sin­gle death penal­ty case in Indiana can cost tax­pay­ers as much as $1 mil­lion. In Marion County, the costs of prepa­ra­tion for three poten­tial death penal­ty tri­als have reached $659,000 this year alone, accord­ing to the Public Defender Agency. A high-pro­­file death penal­ty case in the same coun­ty has cost near­ly $850,000 and not all the bills are in. Pursuing a life sen­tence costs less than the death penal­ty, even con­sid­er­ing the expense of a con­vic­t’s…

Two for­mer mil­i­tary ser­vice­men raised con­cerns about the use of the death penal­ty for war vet­er­ans who have endured trau­mat­ic expe­ri­ences while serv­ing in the United States mil­i­tary. Karl Keys, a for­mer Marine, and Bill Pelke, a for­mer sergeant in the First Air Cavalry, cit­ed the exam­ples of James Floyd Davis and Manny Babbitt, vet­er­ans who received Purple Hearts for their ser­vice in the Vietnam War but were sentenced…

On December 8, the U.S. Supreme Court over­ruled a low­er fed­er­al court that had giv­en relief to Joseph Kindler, a Pennsylvania death row inmate. Kindler had been con­vict­ed of mur­der in 1982, but then escaped to Canada from the Philadelphia Detention Center in 1984. Prior to his escape, his attor­neys had filed post-ver­­dict motions chal­leng­ing his con­vic­tion and sen­tence. Kindler was sub­se­quent­ly caught and, upon his return to…

Renowned death penal­ty defense attor­ney Andrea Lyon​’s forth­com­ing book, Angel of Death Row: My Life as a Death Penalty Defense Lawyer, chron­i­cles her 30 years of expe­ri­ence rep­re­sent­ing clients in cap­i­tal mur­der cas­es. In all of the 19 cas­es where she rep­re­sent­ed defen­dants who were found guilty of cap­i­tal mur­der, jurors spared her clients’ lives. Lyon, who was fea­tured in the PBS doc­u­men­tary Race to Execution and was…

Franklin E. Zimring is a dis­tin­guished pro­fes­sor of law and schol­ar at the Berkeley School of Law who has fol­lowed the devel­op­ment of the mod­ern death penal­ty over many decades. Writing recent­ly in the National Law Journal, Prof. Zimring said the recent action by the American Law Institute to with­draw the death penal­ty pro­vi­sions from its Model Penal Code deprives the pun­ish­ment of any legal legit­i­ma­cy. “[T]he…

On December 4, the New Hampshire Commission to Study the Death Penalty held a hear­ing in Concord to exam­ine the cost of the death penaty in the state. The twen­­ty-two mem­ber Commission, led by retired Judge Walter Murphy, has been charged with con­sid­er­ing sev­er­al issues, includ­ing whether the death penal­ty is a deter­rent, if it is arbi­trar­i­ly applied, and if it cov­ers the appro­pri­ate crimes. The Commission is con­sid­er­ing alternatives to…

Linda Greenhouse, for­mer Supreme Court writer for the New York Times, recent­ly wrote about the rever­sal of a death sen­tence by the U. S. Supreme Court. The Court over­turned George Porter Jr.​‘s death sen­tence because of the inad­e­quate rep­re­sen­ta­tion he received and the pow­er­ful mit­i­gat­ing evi­dence in Mr. Porter’s life that his attor­ney failed to inves­ti­gate and present to the jury con­sid­er­ing his clien­t’s life. The Court’s…

Kenneth Biros, who is sched­uled for exe­cu­tion in Ohio on December 8, request­ed an emer­gency stay of exe­cu­tion in U.S. District Court, argu­ing that Ohio is mov­ing too fast to use its new, one-drug lethal injec­tion process. Last month, Ohio became the first state to adopt a one-drug lethal injec­tion pro­to­col when its three-drug method came under scruti­ny fol­low­ing the botched exe­cu­tion attempt on death row inmate…