Publications & Testimony

Judge Boyce F. Martin, Jr. (pic­tured) of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6^th Circuit called the death penal­ty ​“arbi­trary, biased, and so fun­da­men­tal­ly flawed at its very core that it is beyond repair.” Judge Martin dis­sent­ed in the case of Getsy v. Mitchell and said it made no sense that Jason Getsy received a death sen­tence for his role in a mur­der-for-hire con­spir­a­cy, while the oth­er two trig­ger­men and the mas­ter­mind of the crime, all escaped a death sen­tence. He wrote: In Jason Getsy’s…

A fed­er­al judge ordered the U.S. gov­ern­ment to pay a record $102 mil­lion for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s role in the wrong­ful mur­der con­vic­tions of four men in 1968, includ­ing one man who was sen­tenced to death. U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner said the FBI’s con­duct was ​“shock­ing” and char­ac­ter­ized the gov­ern­men­t’s expla­na­tion for the events lead­ing to the wrong­ful con­vic­tions of Louis Greco, Henry Tameleo, Peter Limone and Joseph Salvati as ​“absurd.” She wrote, ​“Now is the…

In con­tin­u­ing a series that DPIC had high­light­ed ear­li­er, the Denver Post has fea­tured more than a dozen news arti­cles and a series of online videos, pro­vid­ing an in-depth look at the han­dling of cru­cial bio­log­i­cal evi­dence gath­ered dur­ing crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tions. ​“Trashing the Truth: The Hidden Story of Lost Evidence” exam­ined the nation­wide prob­lems with evi­dence stor­age, the destruc­tion of evi­dence, and the rela­tion­ship between miss­ing evi­dence and wrong­ful con­vic­tions. It also…

An updat­ed ver­sion of the ​“Espy File,” a data­base of exe­cu­tions in the United States and the ear­li­er colonies from 1608 to 2002, is now avail­able on DPIC’s Web site. This resource pro­vides detailed infor­ma­tion about each of the 15,269 exe­cu­tions record­ed dur­ing this peri­od and offers a unique glimpse into the his­to­ry of the death penal­ty in the U.S. For exam­ple, about 15% of those exe­cut­ed received the death penal­ty for crimes oth­er than mur­der, includ­ing 277 who were exe­cut­ed for…

Judge Carven Angel of Florida’s Circuit Court has ordered a halt to exe­cu­tions because of con­cerns that the state’s new lethal injec­tion pro­to­cols do not ade­quate­ly address prob­lems exposed in the state’s last exe­cu­tion. The new pro­to­cols were cre­at­ed after Florida’s botched exe­cu­tion of Angel Diaz in December 2006. The exe­cu­tion took more than 30 min­utes after two tries, and then-gov­er­nor Jeb Bush ordered a review of the process. Judge Angel’s oral order to stop exe­cu­tions came on Sunday,…

A recent four-part series in the Denver Post about evi­dence in crim­i­nal cas­es detailed how police depart­ments across the U.S. store and dis­pose of cru­cial bio­log­i­cal evi­dence. The Post exam­ined 10 states in which author­i­ties destroyed bio­log­i­cal evi­dence in near­ly 6,000 rape and mur­der cas­es dur­ing the past decade. The inves­ti­ga­tion also revealed that over the past 30 years, destruc­tion of DNA evi­dence in 28 states has under­mined efforts by at least 141 pris­on­ers to prove their…

A new com­pre­hen­sive study of 200 inno­cence cas­es, all involv­ing peo­ple who were exon­er­at­ed by DNA evi­dence, found that erro­neous iden­ti­fi­ca­tion by eye­wit­ness­es, faulty foren­sic evi­dence, inac­cu­rate infor­mant tes­ti­mo­ny, and false con­fes­sions were the key prob­lems that led to these seri­ous mis­takes. The research — which includ­ed 14 death penal­ty cas­es — also found that courts per­formed mis­er­ably in iden­ti­fy­ing cas­es of inno­cence, and that those exon­er­at­ed were more like­ly to be members…

In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court decid­ed in Ring v. Arizona that the Sixth Amendment’s guar­an­tee of a jury tri­al includ­ed the deter­mi­na­tion of whether suf­fi­cient aggra­vat­ing fac­tors exist­ed to make a defen­dant eli­gi­ble for the death penal­ty. Now, five years lat­er, the man at the cen­ter of this case — Timothy Ring — has been re-sen­tenced to life with­out parole. Ring’s case is among 27 Arizona death penal­ty cas­es affect­ed by the Supreme Court’s rul­ing and re-exam­i­nat­ed by the…

Uneven Justice: State Rates of Incarceration by Race and Ethnicity is a new report by The Sentencing Project that exam­ines the racial and eth­nic dynam­ics of incar­cer­a­tion in the U.S. with tables by state and by race. The report notes that African Americans are incar­cer­at­ed at near­ly 6 times the rate of whites and Hispanics are incar­cer­at­ed at near­ly dou­ble the rate of whites. One in nine (11.7%) African American males between the ages of 25 and 29 is cur­rent­ly incar­cer­at­ed in a prison…