Publications & Testimony

Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio has grant­ed clemen­cy to death row inmate Jeffrey Hill (pic­tured), who was sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed on March 3. ​“After the review of exten­sive mate­r­i­al asso­ci­at­ed with this case, I con­cur with the unan­i­mous ratio­nale and rec­om­men­da­tion of the Ohio Parole Board,“ Strickland said in a state­ment. The Board had vot­ed unan­i­mous­ly for Hill’s com­mu­ta­tion in part because of the victim’s family’s tes­ti­mo­ny that they…

The New Mexico House of Representatives vot­ed February 11 to repeal the death penal­ty. After a more than two-hour debate, the House vot­ed 40 to 28 in favor of replac­ing the death penal­ty with life in prison with­out parole. This is the third time in recent years New Mexico’s House of Representatives has vot­ed to ban cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. House Bill 285 will now move to the…

Bestselling author Thomas Cahill has writ­ten a new book, ​“A Saint on Death Row: The Story of Dominique Green,” about his encounter and grad­ual under­stand­ing of the life of a Texas death row inmate named Dominique Green. Green, who was only 18 at the time of his arrest, was exe­cut­ed in 2004. Cahill’s sto­ry of Green’s life high­lights issues of race, pover­ty, and abuse, trac­ing details of his child­hood through his years on death row. Thomas Cahill is probably…

The Ohio Parole Board unan­i­mous­ly rec­om­mend­ed that Jeffrey Hill’s death sen­tence be com­mut­ed to life in prison with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole. Hill, who is sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed on March 3, was con­vict­ed of mur­der­ing his moth­er while under the influ­ence of drugs. The parole board not­ed the ​“com­pelling and unan­i­mous opin­ion” of the vic­tim’s fam­i­ly that her son and killer should not be exe­cut­ed. The board said, ​“They have suffered…

A new book on inter­na­tion­al devel­op­ments in cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, The Next Frontier: National Development, Political Change, and the Death Penalty in Asia, is now avail­able from Oxford University Press. Authors David Johnson, an expert on law and soci­ety in Asia, and Franklin Zimring, a senior author­i­ty on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, uti­lize their research to iden­ti­fy the crit­i­cal fac­tors affect­ing the future of the death penal­ty in Asia. They found that when an author­i­tar­i­an state…

A for­mer state court admin­is­tra­tor in Montana recent­ly wrote that the death penal­ty is too expen­sive for a ​“court sys­tem that was under­fund­ed, under­staffed, and had more work to do than was human­ly pos­si­ble.” Jim Oppedahl, who worked with the Montana courts for ten years, offered his views in the Helena Independent Record: ​“The real­i­ty is that the death penal­ty pumps mil­lions of dol­lars of very scarce pub­lic resources into a hand­ful of exe­cu­tions and then buries those costs…

Before his retire­ment from the court, Judge Ronald Reagan had sen­tenced a defen­dant to death and kept his views on the death penal­ty to him­self. However, as Nebraska is con­sid­er­ing a bill to abol­ish cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, he spoke in favor of its repeal. ​“I’m a cit­i­zen here. I’d just as soon not have a death penal­ty,” Judge Reagan tes­ti­fied. ​“It just seems to me that peo­ple are rec­og­niz­ing that the death penal­ty is not an appropriate…