Publications & Testimony

States with soft­er gun laws have high­er rates of hand­gun killings, fatal shoot­ings of police offi­cers, and sales of weapons that were used in crimes in oth­er states, accord­ing to a study due out in January 2009. The study’s 38-page report, under­writ­ten by a group of over 300 may­ors and obtained by the Washington Post, focused on track­ing guns used in crimes back to the retailers that…

Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty Releases Report on Death Penalty Developments in 2008​“Average” Number of Executions Carried Out in Record Time as New DeathSentences Reach Lowest Level in Texas in 30 Years(Austin, Texas) — Today the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty(TCADP) released its annu­al report on death penal­ty devel­op­ments statewide, inad­vance of the December 7 anniver­sary of the resump­tion of exe­cu­tions in Texasin 1982. According to the…

A new book, Against the Death Penalty: International Initiatives and Implications, fea­tures lead­ing schol­ars on the death penal­ty and their analy­sis of both the pro­mo­tion and demise of the pun­ish­ment around the world. It con­sid­ers the cur­rent efforts to restrict the death penal­ty with­in the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the African Commission, and the Commonwealth Caribbean. It also inves­ti­gates per­spec­tives and ques­tions for reten­tion­ist coun­tries with a focus…

Mark Osler, a for­mer fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor and present fac­ul­ty mem­ber at a con­ser­v­a­tive Christian law school in Texas, has written Jesus on Death Row: The Trial of Jesus and American…

A new study pub­lished in the Houston Law Review,​“Racial Disparities in the Capital of Capital Punishment,” explores the rela­tion­ship of race to death sen­tenc­ing in Harris County (Houston), Texas. In the study, Prof. Scott Phillips of the University of Denver explores pat­terns involv­ing the race of both vic­tims and defen­dants, while con­trol­ling for oth­er vari­ables. Phillips con­cludes death sen­tences were more like­ly to be imposed in cas­es with white vic­tims than in those…

The state of Washington has car­ried out 4 exe­cu­tions in 45 years, the last one being in 2001 when James Elledge waived his appeals and was exe­cut­ed. Some pros­e­cu­tors, leg­is­la­tors, and defense attor­neys are ques­tion­ing the val­ue of keep­ing the sys­tem. Kitsap County Prosecutor Russell Hauge (pic­tured) sup­ports the death penal­ty but has decid­ed against seek­ing it in a recent case because he felt the appeals process would sim­ply never end. ​“In terms of justice,…

States with the death penal­ty have con­sis­tent­ly had high­er mur­der rates than states with­out the death penal­ty. If the death penal­ty was act­ing as a deter­rent to mur­der, one might expect that the gap between these two groups would lessen over a long peri­od of time as states using the death penal­ty obtained an advan­tage in reduc­ing mur­ders. However, the gap has grown larg­er over the past 18 years. In 2007, states with the death penal­ty had a 42% high­er mur­der rate than…

Professsors Saundra Westervelt and Kimberly Cook of the University of North Carolina recent­ly pub­lished a study entitled ​“Coping with Innocence After Death Row.” The study appeared in​“Contexts” pub­lished by the American Sociological Association. The authors stud­ied the lives of 18 inno­cent men and women exon­er­at­ed from death row. The unique research uncov­ers the dif­fi­cul­ty the exonerees have had in adapt­ing to life out­side of prison with­out the process of…

A new study con­cern­ing crim­i­nal jus­tice pro­ce­dures in Texas has been released by the Justice Project. Their research found that only 12% of Texas law enforce­ment agen­cies have any writ­ten poli­cies or guide­lines for the con­duct of pho­to or live line­up pro­ce­dures. Furthermore, they dis­cov­ered that the few exist­ing writ­ten pro­ce­dures are often vague and incom­plete. Eighty-two per­cent of Texas’ 38 wrong­ful con­vic­tions exposed by DNA test­ing, which includes…

UPDATE: The United States District Court for the District of Kansas entered a stay of exe­cu­tion in Private Ron Gray’s case on November 26. The U.S. mil­i­tary had sched­uled its first exe­cu­tion since 1961 for December 10. Two decades ago, Pvt. Ronald Gray was con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death by a gen­er­al court-mar­­tial pan­el at Fort Bragg for mur­der and rape com­mit­ted in the Fayetteville area of North Carolina. Earlier, a North Carolina civil­ian court had convicted him…