Publications & Testimony

The Hartford Courant has called for an end to the death penal­ty in Connecticut, cit­ing its costs and risks. The paper called a leg­isla­tive committee’s work toward abol­ish­ing Connecticut’s death penal­ty ​“brave,” and said the state’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tem was ​“unwork­able, not to men­tion expen­sive, unfair, and risky.” They quot­ed State Sen. Mary Anne Handley who said: ​“The death penal­ty is nei­ther swift nor cer­tain. It may even be cer­tain that it’s…

Ecuador is demand­ing the return of one of their cit­i­zens from Florida’s death row because they main­tain he was tak­en from Ecuador ille­gal­ly. The inmate, Nelson Serrano Saenz, is a dual cit­i­zen of the U.S. and Ecuador. Ecuador says he should have nev­er been tak­en from their coun­try by Florida offi­cials, call­ing the arrest a ​“kid­nap­ping” and accus­ing the U.S. gov­ern­ment of phys­i­cal mal­treat­ment of Serrano as well. Ecuador does not have the…

According to the lat­est edi­tion of Death Row U.S.A. pub­lished by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), the size of death row decreased slight­ly as of July 1, 2008 com­pared to Jan. 1. After increas­ing steadi­ly for about 25 years, the death row pop­u­la­tion start­ed decreas­ing in 2000. The cur­rent total of defen­dants on state and fed­er­al death rows is 3,307, of whom 45% are white, 41.6% are black, and 11% are Latino/​Latina. Over 98% of those on death…

A study by attor­ney Marcia Wilson was recent­ly pub­lished in the New Mexico Law Review: ​“The Application of the Death Penalty in New Mexico, July 1979 through December 2007: An Empirical Analysis.” Wilson’s research reveals new infor­ma­tion on how the death penal­ty was applied in New Mexico after its rein­state­ment. The arti­cle was pub­lished before New Mexico repealed the death penal­ty in March 2009, and served as valu­able infor­ma­tion dur­ing the leg­isla­tive debate. Wilson…

A ground­break­ing study by Brandon Garrett and Peter Neufeld pub­lished in the Virginia Law Review explores erro­neous sci­en­tif­ic tes­ti­mo­ny by pros­e­cu­tion experts in the tri­als of defen­dants who were lat­er exon­er­at­ed through DNA test­ing. The research, ​“Invalid Forensic Science Testimony and Wrongful Convictions,” explored sero­log­i­cal analy­sis and micro­scop­ic hair com­par­i­son, bite mark evi­dence, shoe prints, soil, fiber, fin­ger­print com­par­isons, and DNA test­ing. In 60% of the…

According to a review by the Houston Chronicle, Texas attor­neys who failed to meet dead­lines in fil­ing their clients’ appeals for­feit­ed the final oppor­tu­ni­ty to appeal for at least 9 men, 6 of whom have already been exe­cut­ed. The fail­ures includ­ed lawyers who mis­cal­cu­lat­ed or mis­un­der­stood the dead­lines, com­put­er fail­ures, and human error. Many were dis­missed sim­ply because they were filed after busi­ness hours on the day of the dead­line. James Marcus, an expert in…