Publications & Testimony

Victor Streib, who has been research­ing the sub­ject of women and the death penal­ty for 20 years, has released an updat­ed ver­sion of his report ​“Death Penalty for Female Offenders.” In his research, Prof. Streib, a pro­fes­sor at Elon University School of Law in North Carolina and Ohio Northern University’s Pettit College of Law, has found that women are sig­nif­i­cant­ly less like­ly than men to receive a death sen­tence, pos­si­bly because pros­e­cu­tors seem less…

The Death Penalty Information Center has con­duct­ed a sur­vey of death row pop­u­la­tions as report­ed by the var­i­ous state depart­ments of cor­rec­tion in January/​February 2008. From that sur­vey, the cur­rent death row pop­u­la­tion across the coun­try is 3,263. California con­tin­ues to have the high­est death row pop­u­la­tion with 669 inmates. Florida fol­lows with 388, and Texas has 370 inmates. A state-by-state break­down appears below. Except for Illinois and the federal…

A men­tal­ly retard­ed man in Texas accept­ed a life sen­tence for a mur­der that occurred over 28 years ago. Johnny Paul Penry was orig­i­nal­ly sen­tenced to death for the sex­u­al assault and mur­der of Pamela Mosley Carpenter, a rel­a­tive of a pro­fes­sion­al foot­ball star. Penry’s death sen­tence was over­turned twice by the U.S. Supreme Court. Prior to the plea agree­ment on February 15, 2008, the pros­e­cu­tion was insist­ing on a fourth cap­i­tal sentencing hearing…

Judge Stephen Roth of Utah has decid­ed to force an unwill­ing attor­ney to han­dle the appeal of death-row inmate Ralph Leroy Menzies after no qual­i­fied lawyers were will­ing to take the assign­ment for the amount of pay offered.​“The court ulti­mate­ly con­cludes that it has the author­i­ty to appoint unwill­ing coun­sel to rep­re­sent the peti­tion­er here, but only if the attor­ney appoint­ed is justly…

By MICHAEL C. DORF Wednesday, February 13, 2008FindLaw’s…

The U.S. gov­ern­ment has decid­ed to seek the death penal­ty against six Guantánamo detainees who are accused of hav­ing cen­tral roles in the ter­ror­ist attacks of September 11, 2001. The defen­dants will be tried before Military Commissions, which are nei­ther part of the fed­er­al crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem nor the mil­i­tary’s jus­tice sys­tem for its own mem­bers. The laws and pro­ce­dures under the Military Commission Act of 2006 have not been test­ed and had to be…

Days after the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that the elec­tric chair was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, a Lincoln Journal Star edi­to­r­i­al urged the state to recon­sid­er the death penal­ty:​“Instead of rush­ing to pass a new means of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, the Legislature should take this oppor­tu­ni­ty to final­ly get rid of the death penal­ty.” Nebraska was the only state to retain the elec­tric chair as its sole means of exe­cu­tion. The paper not­ed that it was the right time to take…

National Public Radio (NPR) recent­ly fea­tured a seg­ment in its StoryCorps series in which a father describes how he came to for­give the man who mur­dered his daugh­ter. Patricia Nuckles was mur­dered by Ivan Simpson in 2001 when she caught him rob­bing her home. Though dev­as­tat­ed by his daughter’s mur­der, Hector Black want­ed to learn more about his daughter’s killer. He learned that Simpson was born in a men­tal hos­pi­tal to a woman who later…

Nebraska Supreme Court Rules Electrocution Unconstitutional The Nebraska Supreme Court ruled on February 8, 2008, that elec­tro­cu­tion is cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment under the state’s con­sti­tu­tion, out­law­ing the elec­tric chair in the only state that still used it as its sole…

Kennedy Brewer, who spent almost 15 years on Mississippi’s death row for the 1992 mur­der and rape of his girlfriend’s 3‑year-old daugh­ter, has been exon­er­at­ed of the charges, and anoth­er man, Justin Johnson, has been arrest­ed for the same crime. A 2001 inves­ti­ga­tion by the Innocence Project found that the semen on the victim’s body did not match Brewer’s DNA, but did match Johnson’s. Johnson was a sus­pect ear­ly in the case, and his blood was col­lect­ed and preserved in…