Publications & Testimony

In a recent op-ed in the New Jersey Daily Record, Jim O’Brien detailed his expe­ri­ences with the legal sys­tem as the father of a mur­der vic­tim. His daugh­ter Deidre was mur­dered in 1982, and the cap­i­tal tri­als and appeals for the man con­vict­ed of the crime last­ed anoth­er 8 years. O’Brien stat­ed, ​“I’ve lived through the state’s process of try­ing to kill [a mur­der­er], and I can say with­out hes­i­ta­tion that it is not worth the anguish that it puts sur­vivors through….” Because of the ​“hor­ren­dous…

By BOB MAKINSTAFF WRITERNovember 28, 2007 Home News…

If cur­rent trends con­tin­ue, New York City will like­ly have few­er than 500 homi­cides this year, the low­est num­ber in a 12-month peri­od since reli­able NYC Police Department sta­tis­tics became avail­able in 1963. As of November 18, 2007, the police depart­ment logged 428 killings, the major­i­ty of which were com­mit­ted by friends or acquain­tances or were drug or gang-relat­ed. In fact, only 35 homi­cides this year were com­mit­ted by strangers to the vic­tims, a num­ber described as ​“micro­scop­ic” in a city…

The New York Times inves­ti­gat­ed the post-exon­er­a­tion lives of the 206 for­mer inmates who were wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed and released through DNA evi­dence. Fifty-three of the cas­es involved mur­der con­vic­tions, and more than 25% of those wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed had giv­en a false con­fes­sion or incrim­i­nat­ing state­ment. Working from a list pro­vid­ed by the Innocence Project, the Times gath­ered infor­ma­tion on 137 of the 206 exonerees and were able to inter­view 115 of those. They found that most…

In a recent arti­cle in the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Dr. Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia University describes numer­ous seri­ous errors in recent deter­rence stud­ies, includ­ing improp­er sta­tis­ti­cal analy­ses and miss­ing data and vari­ables that are nec­es­sary to give a full pic­ture of the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. Fagan writes, ​“There is no reli­able, sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly sound evi­dence that [shows that exe­cu­tions] can exert a deter­rent effect…. These flaws and omis­sions in a body of scientific…

Norm Stamper, a 35-year vet­er­an police offi­cer from San Diego, recent­ly wrote in The Mercury News that from his expe­ri­ence, ​“the death penal­ty is inef­fi­cient and extrav­a­gant­ly expen­sive.” Instead of spend­ing mil­lions of dol­lars on the death penal­ty, Stamper writes, ​“Spending scarce pub­lic resources on after-school pro­grams, men­tal health care, drug and alco­hol treat­ment, edu­ca­tion, more crime labs and new tech­nolo­gies, or on hir­ing more police offi­cers, would tru­ly help cre­ate safer…

The jour­nal of Criminology & Public Policy recent­ly asked lead­ing experts to rec­om­mend impor­tant pol­i­cy changes need­ed in the area of crim­i­nal jus­tice and to pro­vide the evi­dence to sup­port such change. Although most of the arti­cles addressed var­i­ous prison and treat­ment issues, the first arti­cle by Prof. James Acker of the University at Albany called for an imme­di­ate mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions. Prof. Acker exam­ines the United States’ long his­to­ry of grap­pling with the death penal­ty. He…

An inves­ti­ga­tion by The Washington Post and 60 Minutes has cast doubt on at least 250 crim­i­nal cas­es in which the defen­dant was con­vict­ed based on FBI bul­let-lead test evi­dence. Since the ear­ly 1960s, the FBI has used a tech­nique called com­par­a­tive bul­let-lead analy­sis on an esti­mat­ed 2,500 cas­es, many of which were homi­cide cas­es pros­e­cut­ed at state and local lev­els. Comparative bul­let-lead analy­sis, based on the assump­tion that all bul­lets in one batch will be chem­i­cal­ly sim­i­lar, examines…

Jim Willet, for­mer war­den of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Walls Unit where Texas exe­cu­tions take place, recent­ly described his expe­ri­ences to the Dallas Observer as emo­tion­al­ly dif­fi­cult for him. As war­den dur­ing 1998 – 2001, three of the busiest years for Texas’ death cham­ber, Willet over­saw 89 exe­cu­tions. ​“The first time is unbe­liev­able,” he told the Observer. ​“You have this healthy per­son – this per­son who was able to just jump up on the gur­ney – and you’ve said, ​‘Kill this…

In a recent inves­ti­ga­tion pub­lished in The Dallas Morning News, researchers found that 120 defen­dants con­vict­ed of mur­der in Texas between 2000 and 2006 received only a sen­tence of pro­ba­tion. In Dallas County, twice as many con­vict­ed mur­der­ers were sen­tenced to pro­ba­tion as were sent to death row. Typically in these cas­es, a defen­dant pleads guilty to mur­der, receives pro­ba­tion, and, with good behav­ior, can have the mur­der charged wiped from his or her record. The News began…