Publications & Testimony

The death penalty under the Uniform Code of Military Justice was reinstated in 1984. The military death row is located at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. There are currently seven death row inmates awaiting execution, five of whom are African-Americans and two of whom are white. Unlike state executions, members of the military cannot be executed unless the President personally confirms the death sentence. The President also has the power to commute a death sentence…

Oklahoma recently filed a petition with a federal court asking that pentobarbital, an anesthetic agent used in euthanasia of animals, be allowed as a substitute for sodium thiopental in lethal injection procedures. Earlier this year, Hospira Inc., the nation’s sole manufacturer of the latter drug, announced that it has ceased production because of a shortage in one of the ingredients. The shortage has forced Oklahoma and other states to delay executions and seek other sources for the drug.

On November 4, the Arkansas Supreme Court ordered evidentiary hearings to consider whether newly analyzed DNA evidence should result in a new trial for Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin, who were convicted of the 1993 murders of three West Memphis Cub Scouts. Echols was sentenced to death and the other defendants received life. The results of the DNA tests on evidence from the crime scene excluded Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley as the sources. The high court also ordered an…

On October 13, officials from the U.S. and Europe held what may have been the first ever international forum of law enforcement officers on the merits of the death penalty in reducing violent crime. The officers discussed whether capital punishment actually helps to keep citizens safe, assists healing for victims, and uses crime-fighting resources efficiently. The panelists, who included current and former police officers from the U.S. land Europe, addressed issues such as deterrence, closure…

At a recent press conference in Texas, prosecutors accused former district attorney Charles Sebesta of hiding and tampering with evidence, and of threatening witnesses in order to convict Anthony Graves in 1994. Graves was recently exonerated from death row and freed after 18 years of confinement for a crime he did not commit. Kelly Siegler, a special prosecutor hired to review Graves’s case after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit overturned his conviction, said Sebesta indicted…

Elie Wiesel, acclaimed author, human rights activist, Nobel Peace laureate and Holocaust survivor, spoke about his opposition to the death penalty during a lecture on capital punishment at Wesleyan University in Connecticut in October. Wiesel, who lost both parents and a sister in the Nazi death camps, focused his remarks on family members of murder victims. He said that murderers should be punished more harshly than other prisoners and encouraged the criminal justice system to focus efforts on…

Anthony Graves (pictured) was released from a Texas prison on October 27 after Washington-Burleson County District Attorney Bill Parham filed a motion to dismiss all charges that had resulted in Graves being sent to death row 16 years ago. Graves was convicted in 1994 of assisting Robert Carter in multiple murders in 1992. There was no physical evidence linking Graves to the crime, and his conviction relied primarily on Carter’s testimony that Graves was his accomplice. Two weeks before Carter…