Publications & Testimony

The costs of the death penal­ty have been a bur­den on var­i­ous coun­ties in Mississippi for many years. Quitman County was forced to raise tax­es for three years and bor­rowed $150,000 to pro­vide legal coun­sel to Robert Simon and Anthony Carr, who were sen­tenced to death for mur­ders com­mit­ted in 1990. A death-penal­ty case ​“is almost like light­ning strik­ing,” coun­ty admin­is­tra­tor Butch Scipper told The Wall Street Journal in 2002. ​“It is…

A recent edi­to­r­i­al in America Magazine enti­tled The Price of Death reviewed the grow­ing prob­lems with the death penal­ty and stat­ed, ​“It is time for the nation to con­clude once and for all that in our civ­i­lized soci­ety there is no place for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment.” The nation­al Catholic week­ly cit­ed the recent­ly botched exe­cu­tion in Ohio, racial dis­par­i­ties, and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of exe­cut­ing the inno­cent as rea­sons why pub­lic sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment has declined.

On October 28, 2009, Travis County, Texas, pros­e­cu­tors moved to dis­miss all charges against Michael Scott and Robert Springsteen, who had been con­vict­ed of the mur­der of four teens in an Austin yogurt shop in 1991. (Springsteen was con­vict­ed in 2001; Scott in 2002.) Springsteen had been sen­tenced to death and Scott was sen­tenced to life in prison. The con­vic­tions of both men were over­turned by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals because they had not been…

A recent edi­to­r­i­al from the Aurora Sentinel in Colorado com­ment­ed on the botched exe­cu­tion of Romell Broom. The paper enti­tled its posi­tion as ​“Time for America to move past cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment.” In addi­tion to cit­ing the prob­lems with lethal injec­tion, the paper not­ed the risk of exe­cut­ing the inno­cent and the U.S.‘s increas­ing iso­la­tion on the death penal­ty in the world. The edi­to­r­i­al con­tin­ut­ed, ​“Even for those who believe that such heinous…

The Council of the American Law Institute (ALI) recent­ly vot­ed to with­draw a sec­tion of its Model Penal Code con­cerned with cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment because of the ​“cur­rent intractable insti­tu­tion­al and struc­tur­al obsta­cles to ensur­ing a min­i­mal­ly ade­quate sys­tem for admin­is­ter­ing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment.” The Council based its deci­sion on a study it com­mis­sioned to look into the prac­tice of the death penal­ty since the rec­om­men­da­tions were made in the Model Penal Code.

The University of Missouri-Kansas City Law Review recent­ly pub­lished a sym­po­sium issue of Death Penalty Stories, high­light­ing the role of the nar­ra­tive in the defense of death penal­ty cas­es. The com­pi­la­tion includes con­tri­bu­tions from lit­i­ga­tors who have used per­sua­sive nar­ra­tive in sup­port of a life sen­tence. Russell Stetler’s The Unknown Story of a Motherless Child chron­i­cles the case of Edgar H., who was con­vict­ed of killing four men in California. Edgar’s…

A grow­ing back­log of death penal­ty cas­es and delays in start­ing tri­als in Arizona’s Maricopa County has forced Superior Court judges to apply pres­sure on both sides by refus­ing to post­pone tri­al dates and demand­ing that attor­neys dis­cuss set­tle­ments. The back­log came as a result of County Attorney Andrew Thomas’s aggres­sive pur­suit of death sen­tences in more than 120 cas­es since tak­ing office in 2005. The num­ber of death penal­ty defen­dants grew faster than…

Scott Phillips, a pro­fes­sor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Denver, recent­ly pub­lished a study that revealed dis­par­i­ties in who receives the death penal­ty inTexas. Phillips stud­ied the 504 death penal­ty cas­es that occurred between 1992 and 1999 in Harris County (Houston and sur­round­ing areas). Harris County is the largest juris­dic­tion in the United States to use a court-appoint­ment sys­tem for select­ing lawyers to defend…