Publications & Testimony

The top medical officer for the Department of Corrections in the state of Washington has resigned in order to avoid any participation in the state’s execution process. As the doctor responsible for preparing others to carry out lethal injections, Dr. Marc Stern concluded that his ethical obligations as a physician required that he recuse himself from such actions and that resigning was the only way to fully remove himself from this process. Dr. Stern, who supervised 700 employees around the…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld a $14 million award to John Thompson, a former death row inmate in Louisiana who was exonerated after withheld evidence was revealed. Thompson spent 18 years in prison, including 14 years in the solitary confinement of death row in Angola Prison. He came within one month of being executed in 1999 when his attorneys discovered blood evidence that should have been turned over to the defense years ago. The new evidence cleared Thompson of an…

Ray Samuels, a police officer for 33 years and Chief of Police in Newark, California, for 5 years, recently expressed concern that state budget cuts will prevent important crime-fighting measures from being passed, while an expensive death penalty continues to drain the state’s finances. In an op-ed in the Contra Costa Times, Samuels wrote: Local jurisdictions are likely to lose a significant amount of state funding this year because of the severe financial crisis. This funding helps cities…

The Presiding Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court, Oliver Diaz, dissented in a recent capital case, Doss v. Mississippi, stating he had come to the conclusion that the death penalty is unconstitutional: [A]ll that remains to justify our system of capital punishment is the quest for revenge, and I cannot find, as a matter of law, that the thirst for vengeance is a legitimate state interest. Even if it is, capital punishment’s benefit over life imprisonment in society’s quest for revenge is…

Research on death qualification — the selection of jurors who are qualified to serve on a capital case because they are willing to sentence someone to death — has revealed additional characteristics among such jurors. Professor Brooke Butler of the University of South Florida in Sarasota has studied such jurors and published her results in the journal of Behavioral Sciences and the Law. Her study, “Death qualification and prejudice: the effect of implicit racism, sexism, and homophobia on capital…

Brian Nichols was sentenced to life in prison without parole in Georgia on December 13 after the jury could not reach a unanimous verdict of death. Nichols had been found guilty of killing a judge, a court reporter, a police deputy, and a U.S. Customs agent during his escape from a courthouse hearing on other charges. The jury remained deadlocked in a 9 – 3 vote after four days of deliberations. A unanimous vote is required for a death sentence, just as it is for a guilty verdict. The jury did…