Publications & Testimony

A recent investigaton by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram uncovered a series of mistakes by medical examiners in Texas. “Medical examiners have goofed up eye color and gender. They’ve made mistakes on the locations of scars or tattoos, described gallbladders and appendixes that had long since been removed – even confused one body for another,” noted the story. Webb County Chief Medical Examiner Corinne Stern was criticized for an autopsy she performed on an infant while she was working in Alabama.

A new database of death row prisoners in the U.S. is now available on DPIC’s Web site. The database contains current sortable and searchable information on death row inmates in each state, including their name, race, county, and date of birth. The information in the database is also editable, meaning that individuals with knowledge of death row inmates may change or add new information. This new database may be a useful tool in exploring how the death penalty is applied. Click here to access…

Todd Snider, the father of Zachary Snider, who was killed at age 10 by Christopher Stevens in Indiana, accepted final resolution of the case against Stevens when a settlement was reached for a sentence of life without parole. “Our family has suffered enough and would like for this to be resolved once and for all,” Mr. Snider said about the life sentence. “This will give our family finality. Chris Stevens will die in prison and will never have the opportunity to destroy people’s lives again.”

In an editorial on September 28 in the New York Times, the paper called the death penalty “an economic drain on governments with already badly depleted budgets.” Citing figures from the Death Penalty Information Center, the Times noted that “States waste millions of dollars on winning death penalty verdicts, which require an expensive second trial, new witnesses and long jury selections. Death rows require extra security and maintenance costs.” The editors remarked that some states have begun…

Japan, the only other industrialized democracy apart from the United States that still practices the death penalty, may see a halt to executions with the recent appointment of Keiko Chiba as justice minister. Chiba, a lawyer and active death penalty abolitionist for the past 20 years, would have to provide the final signature for an execution to occur. In Japan, a convicted individual can only meet with lawyers and family members once he has exhausted his appeals. He is told of his execution…

John Diaz, the editorial page editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, recently questioned the wisdom of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the death penalty in California. Diaz pointed to the enormous expense of maintaining capital punishment in the state: “Today, California has nearly 700 inmates on death row, more than any other state, with their cases in varying levels of appeal. The housing of an inmate on death row is more than triple the $40,000 annual cost of incarcerating…