Publications & Testimony

The American Board of Anesthesiologists (ABA), representing 40,000 members, recently ruled that it will revoke the certification of any member who participates in an execution by lethal injection. Most hospitals require board certification for their anesthesiologists. According to the board secretary Mark Rockoff, the decision reflects the ABA’s belief that anesthesiologists are “healers, not executioners.” Some states have recruited doctors, including anesthesiologists, to play a role in…

After spending 20 years on death row, inmates Roy Gene Smith and David Lewis had their death sentences thrown out by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on April 28. The state’s highest criminal court ruled that jurors who convicted Smith were erroneously kept from hearing testimony about his upbringing in a crime-ridden Houston neighborhood. The court also determined that Lewis should have been able to present evidence of his damaged eyesight and that he began using drugs and alcohol with his…

A New York truck driver, who spent nearly 19 years in prison for murder, was released on April 28, after testing of DNA found in the victim’s clothing excluded him as the killer. Frank Sterling, now 46, was convicted of the 1988 murder of Viola Manville after he confessed to the crime during an all-night interrogation. He later recanted this confession, claiming he had slipped into an hypnotic state during the lengthy questioning and parroted details given to him about the crime. The DNA test…

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…