Publications & Testimony

Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio has granted clemency to death row inmate Jeffrey Hill (pictured), who was scheduled to be executed on March 3. “After the review of extensive material associated with this case, I concur with the unanimous rationale and recommendation of the Ohio Parole Board,“ Strickland said in a statement. The Board had voted unanimously for Hill’s commutation in part because of the victim’s family’s testimony that they wished Hill’s life be spared. The Governor explained in…

The New Mexico House of Representatives voted February 11 to repeal the death penalty. After a more than two-hour debate, the House voted 40 to 28 in favor of replacing the death penalty with life in prison without parole. This is the third time in recent years New Mexico’s House of Representatives has voted to ban capital punishment. House Bill 285 will now move to the senate. (S. Terrell, “House Votes to Abolsih the Death Penalty,” The New Mexican, February 11, 2009). See Recent Legislation.

Bestselling author Thomas Cahill has written a new book, “A Saint on Death Row: The Story of Dominique Green,” about his encounter and gradual understanding of the life of a Texas death row inmate named Dominique Green. Green, who was only 18 at the time of his arrest, was executed in 2004. Cahill’s story of Green’s life highlights issues of race, poverty, and abuse, tracing details of his childhood through his years on death row. Thomas Cahill is probably best known for his New York Times…

The Ohio Parole Board unanimously recommended that Jeffrey Hill’s death sentence be commuted to life in prison with the possibility of parole. Hill, who is scheduled to be executed on March 3, was convicted of murdering his mother while under the influence of drugs. The parole board noted the “compelling and unanimous opinion” of the victim’s family that her son and killer should not be executed. The board said, “They have suffered tremendous loss, and execution would add further to their…

A new book on international developments in capital punishment, The Next Frontier: National Development, Political Change, and the Death Penalty in Asia, is now available from Oxford University Press. Authors David Johnson, an expert on law and society in Asia, and Franklin Zimring, a senior authority on capital punishment, utilize their research to identify the critical factors affecting the future of the death penalty in Asia. They found that when an authoritarian state experienced democratic…

A former state court administrator in Montana recently wrote that the death penalty is too expensive for a “court system that was underfunded, understaffed, and had more work to do than was humanly possible.” Jim Oppedahl, who worked with the Montana courts for ten years, offered his views in the Helena Independent Record: “The reality is that the death penalty pumps millions of dollars of very scarce public resources into a handful of executions and then buries those costs in a thicket of…

Before his retirement from the court, Judge Ronald Reagan had sentenced a defendant to death and kept his views on the death penalty to himself. However, as Nebraska is considering a bill to abolish capital punishment, he spoke in favor of its repeal. “I’m a citizen here. I’d just as soon not have a death penalty,” Judge Reagan testified. “It just seems to me that people are recognizing that the death penalty is not an appropriate punishment in a civilized society.” Calling capital punishment…