Publications & Testimony

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…

A new report,​“Double Tragedies,” address­es the ques­tion of whether peo­ple with severe men­tal ill­ness should face the death penal­ty. The report was authored by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights (MVFHR) and called for treat­ment and pre­ven­tion instead of exe­cu­tion for such offend­ers. The report, based on exten­sive inter­views with 21 fam­i­ly mem­bers in 10 dif­fer­ent states, calls the…

Attorneys for Ohio death row inmate Kevin Keith have pre­sent­ed new evi­dence cast­ing doubt on his orig­i­nal con­vic­tion in briefs filed with the Ohio State Supreme Court. The Ohio Innocence Project has also asked for a new tri­al for Keith, sup­port­ing the claim that sup­pressed evi­dence points to anoth­er sus­pect who said he was paid to $15,000 to​“crip­ple” the drug infor­mant who was the vic­tim of the shoot­ings for which Keith was condemned to…

Richard A. Viguerie, who has been called​“one of the cre­ators of the mod­ern con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment” by The Nation mag­a­zine, recent­ly wrote an op-ed in which he dis­cuss­es how his con­ser­v­a­tive ide­ol­o­gy led him to oppose the death penal­ty and calls for a nation­al mora­to­ri­um on the death penalty. ​“The fact is, I don’t under­stand why more con­ser­v­a­tives don’t oppose the death penal­ty,” writes Viguerie. He argues the…

Each year, DPIC col­lects rel­e­vant death penal­ty arti­cles that have appeared in print and on media Web sites. Our col­lec­tion cer­tain­ly does not con­tain all such arti­cles, nor do we claim that it rep­re­sents the​“best” arti­cles. It is only a rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­ple of the exten­sive cov­er­age giv­en to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in print in a par­tic­u­lar year. For those inter­est­ed in exam­in­ing this cov­er­age, we have pre­pared an index of the articles from…