Publications & Testimony

Colorado House Committee Advances Bill to Abolish Capital Punishment The House Judiciary Committee recent­ly vot­ed to abol­ish the state’s death penal­ty, replac­ing it with a sen­tence of life-with­­out-parole, and use the mon­ey cur­rent­ly spent on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment to help solve 1,200 cold-case homi­cides in the state. The 7 – 4 vote fol­lowed four hours of testimony from…

Court Rules California’s New Lethal Injection Procedures are Invalid Superior Court Judge Lynn O’Malley Taylor held that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation failed to fol­low prop­er pro­ce­dure for insti­tut­ing new reg­u­la­tions when it issued new lethal injec­tion pro­to­cols in May. Under state law, an agency that adopts new reg­u­la­tions must first pub­lish the text,…

In April 2001, Governor Huckabee signed a law pro­vid­ing for Defense Counsel Standards…

The ban on exe­cut­ing the men­tal­ly retard­ed was signed into law ear­li­er this year, and Napolitano said she backed most of the oth­er rec­om­men­da­tions, say­ing,​“If the state wants to con­tin­ue to have the death penal­ty, they bet­ter fund some of these things.” Read the report. (Associated Press,…

On May 20, 2001, Governor Siegelman signed a law cre­at­ing the Committee on Compensation for Wrongful Incarceration allow­ing repa­ra­tions to be made in the event that an inno­cent per­son is con­vict­ed and imprisoned…

On Tuesday, Dec. 4, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear argu­ments in Snyder v. Louisiana, a case involv­ing a black defen­dant sen­tenced to death by an all-white jury after the pros­e­cu­tion used its peremp­to­ry strikes to exclude all of the qual­i­fied black jurors. During Allen Snyder’s 1996 tri­al for the mur­der of a man his estranged wife was dat­ing, pros­e­cu­tor James Williams of Jefferson Parish urged the all-white jury to sen­tence the defen­dant to death so that Snyder would not…

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….”…

By BOB MAKINSTAFF WRITERNovember 28, 2007 Home…

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…

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.