Publications & Testimony

The New Hampshire House of Representatives passed a bill to estab­lish a Commission to Study the Death Penalty. Many offi­cials who have had first-hand expe­ri­ence with New Hampshire’s death penal­ty, includ­ing for­mer Attorneys General Phillip McLaughlin, Peter Heed and Greg Smith, for­mer Superior Court Chief Justice Walter Murphy and for­mer Supreme Court Justice William Batchelder, sup­port the estab­lish­ment of a com­mis­sion to study the state’s death penal­ty pro­ce­dures. If passed, the bill will…

The Innocence Commission, a new book by Jon B. Gould, describes how the advent of DNA test­ing and oth­er foren­sic advances in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem have led to seri­ous efforts to under­stand how so many wrong­ful con­vic­tions have hap­pened. In par­tic­u­lar, The Innocence Commission details the first years of the Innocence Commission for Virginia (ICVA), which was the first in the coun­try to con­duct sys­temic research into all wrong­ful con­vic­tions in the state. Gould, the Chair of ICVA,…

Federal District Court Judge Jack B. Weinstein said recent­ly that seek­ing the death penal­ty against Humberto Pepin Taveras in New York is not worth the effort of pros­e­cu­tors or tax­pay­ers’ mon­ey. ​“Based on the his­to­ry of cas­es tried in met­ro­pol­i­tan New York, the chance of Pepin receiv­ing the death penal­ty is vir­tu­al­ly nil,” Weinstein said. The case against Taveras, who con­fessed to mur­der­ing two drug traf­fick­ers in the 1990s while already serv­ing more than 12 years in prison for other crimes,…

During his 15-year tenure on the court, Orange County Superior Court Judge Donald McCartin sen­tenced nine men to death. Now retired, Judge McCartin no longer believes in the death penal­ty. ​“It’s a waste of time and tax­pay­ers’ mon­ey,” Judge McCartin said. ​“It cost 10 times more to kill these guys than to keep them alive in prison. It’s absurd. And imag­ine the poor vic­tims’ fam­i­lies hav­ing to go through this again and again.” All but one of the nine men Judge McCartin sen­tenced to death still…

Connecticut Superior Court Judge Stanley T. Fuger ruled on February 27 that a suit alleg­ing racial and geo­graph­ic bias in the state’s death penal­ty should not be dis­missed. Judge Fuger is allow­ing the claim from sev­en death row inmates to con­tin­ue because the state’s con­sti­tu­tion gives defen­dants greater legal rights than the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court had reject­ed a sim­i­lar claim about Georgia’s death penal­ty in 1987 based on fed­er­al con­sti­tu­tion­al grounds. In his rul­ing on a…

February 28,…

Two recent arti­cles in the Dallas Morning News detail the lives of those affect­ed by the wrong­ful impris­on­ment of Christopher Ochoa and Richard Danziger in Texas. For some, their faith in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem has been shat­tered. Twelve years after being sen­tenced to life in prison for a 1988 rape and mur­der, Ochoa and Danziger were exon­er­at­ed by DNA evi­dence. At the time of his arrest, Ochoa, after 15 hours of inter­ro­ga­tion, gave a false confession to…

At a hear­ing of the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice held in Los Angeles, the moth­er of a mur­der vic­tim tes­ti­fied about why she believed the death penal­ty does not serve vic­tims’ needs. Aba Gayle’s daugh­ter, Catherine Blount, was a teenag­er when she was mur­dered in 1980 by Douglas Mickey. At first, Gayle told the Commission, ​“The dis­trict attor­ney assured me that the exe­cu­tion of the man respon­si­ble for Catherine’s mur­der would help me heal, and for…