Publications & Testimony

In response to an amend­ment to the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act that would add the death penal­ty as a pun­ish­ment for cer­tain offens­es under the Act, Senator Edward Kennedy (MA) entered a state­ment into the Congressional Record high­light­ing some of the risks of the death penal­ty. An excerpt of his statement…

The Innocence Project has released a new report point­ing to the prob­lems with eye­wit­ness iden­ti­fi­ca­tions in crim­i­nal cas­es and offer­ing rec­om­men­da­tions for mak­ing the sys­tem more reli­able. The report,​“Reevaluating Lineups: Why Witnesses Make Mistakes and How to Reduce the Chance of a Misidentification,” states that over 175 peo­ple (includ­ing some who were sen­tenced to death) have been wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed based, in part, on…

The Ohio Parole Board made a rare rec­om­men­da­tion of clemen­cy on July 17, vot­ing 5 – 2 that Jason Getsy​’s death sen­tence should be reduced to life with­out parole. Getsy is sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed on August 18 for the mur­der of Ann Serafino in 1995. A co-defen­­dant who ini­ti­at­ed and orga­nized the crime received a less­er sen­tence of 35 years to life.​“In impos­ing a death sen­tence, it is imper­a­tive that we have consistency and…

John Bellinger, who served as legal advis­er to the State Department from 2005 to 2009, has called on President Obama to assist in the review of the death penal­ty cas­es of for­eign nation­als who were denied rights under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The U.S. has rat­i­fied the Vienna Convention and the Protocol that pro­vides for res­o­lu­tion of dis­putes in the International Court of Justice in the Hague (ICJ). Mexico brought a suit to…

The risk that inno­cent peo­ple could be exe­cut­ed remains high, as illus­trat­ed by the two most recent exon­er­a­tions from death row. Ronald Kitchen was freed from prison Illinois after the state dis­missed all charges against him on July 7. He had spent 13 years on death row and a total of 21 years in prison. Governor George Ryan had com­mut­ed his sen­tence to life in 2003, along with all oth­er death row inmates. Kitchen’s orig­i­nal conviction was…

On July 15, the House of Representatives of North Carolina vot­ed 61 – 53 to pass the Racial Justice Act. A sim­i­lar bill already passed the state sen­ate, though that bill con­tained an amend­ment to bypass some objec­tions to the state’s exe­cu­tion process. The new law, if final­ly approved, would allow judges to con­sid­er whether racial bias played a role in the deci­sion to seek or impose the death penal­ty.​“This is a fair­ness bill,” said Rep. Larry Womble, the…

Jefferson Parish near New Orleans has sent 28 peo­ple to death row since the death penal­ty was rein­stat­ed in 1975, many of them under the cur­rent District Attorney, Paul Connick Jr., who took office in 1997. But no one has been sen­tenced to death in that parish in the past 5 years and pros­e­cu­tors haven’t even tried a cap­i­tal case in the past 4 years, despite a num­ber of high-pro­­file mur­ders. This decrease in death sen­tenc­ing is not unique to Louisiana.​“The trend in these…

Two experts in crim­i­nol­o­gy chal­lenged the ratio­nale for California​’s high spend­ing on the death penal­ty in a recent op-ed in the Contra Costa Times. Michael Radelet, chair of the Sociology Department at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and Werner Einstadter, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of crim­i­nol­o­gy and soci­ol­o­gy at Eastern Michigan University, con­trast­ed California’s mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar spend­ing on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment with the lack of any…

The lat­est issue of the report, ​“Death Penalty for Female Offenders,” has been released by Professor Victor Streib of the Ohio Northern University School of Law. The report includes nation­al trends regard­ing women and the death penal­ty and case details about indi­vid­ual female death row inmates from 1973 through June 30, 2009. The report notes that while women account for one in ten mur­der arrests (10%), only one in forty-nine death sen­tences imposed at tri­al are for…

Professor Ty Alper of the Boalt School of Law at Berkeley has writ­ten an arti­cle for the forth­com­ing edi­tion of the North Carolina Law Review enti­tled​“The Truth About Physician Participation in Lethal Injection Executions.” Prof. Alper, a not­ed death penal­ty expert, reviews the avail­able research and recent lit­i­ga­tion on the most wide­ly used method of exe­cu­tion in the U.S., focus­ing espe­cial­ly on the poten­tial role of doc­tors in exe­cu­tions. As states…