Publications & Testimony

James Tyrone Woodson’s death sen­tence was over­turned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976 because the jury had not been allowed to con­sid­er any mit­i­gat­ing fac­tors in his life or about his periph­er­al role in the crime. The Court not only reject­ed Woodson’s death sen­tence, but held that a manda­to­ry death penal­ty sys­tem was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. Woodson had been con­vict­ed in 1974 of first-degree mur­der, which was auto­mat­i­cal­ly pun­ish­able by the death penal­ty under North…

The Last Lawyer: The Fight to Save Death Row Inmates is a book by John Temple about the coura­geous work of a death penal­ty defense attor­ney in the south. Ken Rose is an attor­ney at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in North Carolina. He has han­dled many cap­i­tal cas­es, but the focus of this book is his defense of Bo Jones, a men­tal­ly hand­i­capped farm­hand con­vict­ed of a mur­der that occurred in 1987 and…

Virginia has not had a death ver­dict from a jury since March 2008, the longest stretch of time with­out a death ver­dict since the death penal­ty was rein­stat­ed in the 1970s. Nationally, there has also been a decline in death sen­tences: accord­ing to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 115 death sen­tences in 2007, 65% less than the 326 that were hand­ed down in 1995. In Virginia, part of this decline might be attrib­uted to a change in state law made…

On November 16, the United States Supreme Court accept­ed for review and hand­ed down a per curi­am deci­sion in Wong v. Belmontes (No. 08 – 1263). The Court rein­stat­ed Fernando Belmontes’ death sen­tence and over­turned the deci­sion of the Ninth Circuit grant­i­ng relief because of inef­fec­tive­ness of coun­sel. Belmontes was sen­tenced to death for mur­der­ing a woman dur­ing a rob­bery in 1981 in California. The appeals court ruled in 2008 that…

The Bob Edwards on Sirius XM Radio recent­ly explored the high costs of the death penal­ty and the views of the coun­try’s police chiefs as dis­cussed in DPIC’s lat­est report, ​“Smart on Crime: Reconsidering the Death Penalty in a Time of Economic Crisis.” Edwards is the for­mer host of National Public Radio’s ​“Morning Edition.” He inter­viewed DPIC’s Executive Director Richard Dieter on October 20.

On November 13, Ohio announced that it was adopt­ing a sin­gle-drug pro­to­col for lethal injec­tion, mak­ing it the first state to embrace this change. Ohio will inject inmates with a large dose of an anes­thet­ic, thiopen­tal sodi­um, which is sup­posed to both ren­der the inmate uncon­scious and even­tu­al­ly cause death. The state also said it will employ a back-up method of exe­cu­tion involv­ing the injec­tion of two anes­thet­ic drugs into the mus­cle of the defen­dant. In September, Ohio…