Publications & Testimony

New Jersey Senator Raymond Lesniak deliv­ered the fol­low­ing speech at the Memorial de Caen International Human Rights Competition in Caen, France on Sunday, February 1,2009. The com­pe­ti­tion includ­ed lawyers from Washington, D.C., France, Belgium, Guinea, Senegal, and Switzerland with speech top­ics rang­ing from gov­ern­men­tal to mil­i­tary abus­es of human…

Texas death row inmate Larry Swearingen was unan­i­mous­ly grant­ed a stay one day before his sched­uled exe­cu­tion by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5^th Circuit on January 26. ​“We think this is an extra­or­di­nary case of actu­al inno­cence,” said Swearingen’s attor­ney James Rytting. ​“We’re hope­ful that the fed­er­al courts will give the evi­dence a fair review.” Judge Jacques Wiener, who con­curred in the Circuit Court’s opin­ion and stay, under­lined the potential…

A new arti­cle in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science enti­tled ​“Convicting the Innocent” by Prof. Samuel Gross of the Universiry of Michigan Law School explores the rate of false con­vic­tions among death-sen­tenced inmates and exam­ines the demo­graph­i­cal and pro­ce­dur­al pre­dic­tors of such errors. Prof. Gross not­ed that ear­li­er research showed the exon­er­a­tion rate to be 2.3% for inmates who had been on death row at least 15 years and a sim­i­lar rate for…

The Houston Chronicle is call­ing on Texas Governor Rick Perry to delay the exe­cu­tion of Larry Swearingen, which is sched­uled for January 27. The Chronicle notes that the foren­sic sci­en­tist who tes­ti­fied about the time of death of the vic­tim at Swearingen’s tri­al now believes the death occurred lat­er, a time at which Swearingen was in police cus­tody on anoth­er mat­ter. Five oth­er physi­cians and foren­sic experts con­curred that the murder…

The Tennessee Law Review is host­ing a col­lo­qui­um enti­tled, ​“The Past, Present, and Future of the Death Penalty.” The event will take place February 6 – 7 at the University of Tennessee College of Law in Knoxville and will fea­ture nation­al­ly known experts in this field, includ­ing David Baldus, Hugo Adam Bedau, Stephen Bright, Deborah Denno, Lyn Entzeroth, the Honorable Gilbert S. Merritt, and Penny White. Judge Merritt will deliv­er the keynote address on ​“Why So Much…