Publications & Testimony

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…

Life and Death Matters: Seeking the Truth About Capital Punishment is a new book that doc­u­ments author Robert Baldwin’s per­son­al jour­ney in con­fronting racism and the death penal­ty in the Deep South. Baldwin shares his evo­lu­tion in a con­ver­sa­tion­al, first-per­son style with a declared faith per­spec­tive. Written for peo­ple of all beliefs and back­grounds, he focus­es on the myths and mis­con­cep­tions about pris­ons and the death penal­ty dis­cov­ered through his…

A bill is being intro­duced in Colorado to end the state’s death penal­ty and to use the resul­tant sav­ings to inves­ti­gate the state’s more than 1,300 unsolved crimes. More than 500 res­i­dents who have lost friends and fam­i­ly to unsolved mur­ders are push­ing for the bill, which is expect­ed to be intro­duced by House Majority Leader Paul Weissmann. The pro­po­nents esti­mate that 3 in 10 killers in the state walk free, and catch­ing more killers would be a more effec­tive deterrent than…

Five peo­ple in Nebraska were recent­ly par­doned for a 1985 mur­der after new DNA evi­dence exclud­ed their par­tic­i­pa­tion in the crime. The group was also known as the ​“Beatrice Six.” The sixth man, the only one who had insist­ed on a jury tri­al, was exon­er­at­ed in October 2008 when pros­e­cu­tors declined to seek a new…