Publications & Testimony

A bill that would change California’s lethal injection procedure unanimously passed the Senate Public Safety Committee on April 20. Senate Bill 1018, authored by Sen. Tom Harman, would require the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to develop and implement a one-drug lethal injection process involving an appropriate anesthetic. California has had a de facto moratorium on executions since February 2006 when a federal judge held that the state’s 3‑drug lethal injection system…

The AFP recently examined the time an inmate spends on death row between sentencing and execution and questioned if inmates are being punished twice with long-term imprisonment and execution. They found an average inmate spends 13 years on death row, with some spending 30 years or more. Craig Haney, professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and expert on prisoners held in isolation, said, “People on death row live under the threat of death, which is of course an…

In California, families of murder victims Amber Dubois and Chelsea King agreed to a life sentence without parole for the girls’ killer, John Albert Gardner. Brent King, Chelsea’s father, said that agreeing with County District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis’ decision not to seek the death penalty for his daugther’s killer was “torturous,” but so would have been a death penalty trial and the years of appeals that follow. Dumanis said there was enough evidence to convict Gardner for Chelsea’s murder…

Bud Welch, father of Julie Welch who was killed in the Oklahoma City Bombing, recently appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show, just a few days before the 15^th anniversary of the bombing in Oklahoma. Welch, who is the president of Murder Victims’ Familes for Human Rights, has been a long-time opponent of the death penalty and has said that executions are more often “staged political events” instead of a part of the healing process for victims. When asked how he came to oppose the death pealty for…

A recent editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune calls for Utahns and their elected leaders to consider abandoning the death penalty citing that “state-sponsored killing of a human being, no matter how heinous the crime, is permitted by a system that has been proven beyond doubt to be inherently capricious, unfair and shockingly fallible.” The editorial also pointed to the declining use of the death penalty nationwide, with an all-time high of 328 death sentences in 1994 compared to 106 death…

Scott Phillips, a sociology and criminology professor at the University of Denver, published a study last month in the Law & Society Review focusing on the imposition of death sentences in relation to the victim’s social status. Phillips studied capital cases in Harris County (Houston), Texas, between 1992 and 1999 and found that the social status of the victim in the underlying murder had a significant influence on whether the death penalty would be sought and imposed on the defendant. In…

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund recently released its Fall 2009 edition of Death Row USA, a report detailing death row populations across the United States. According to the report, California, Florida and Texas continue to lead the nation in the number of death row inmates, with California (694) having a death row population almost twice as large as either Florida (395) or Texas (339). In addition, while Florida’s and Texas’ death row populations have declined in the last decade…