Publications & Testimony

A Florida inmate faces execution despite new revelations that the state prompted a trial witness to lie. Inmate Wayne Tompkins was to be executed in Florida on October 28, 2008, but was granted a stay of execution to allow time for the state Supreme Court to review his case. On November 7, the court denied Tompkins’ appeal, even though the court acknowledged that a state witness, a jailhouse informant, admitted to providing false testimony at Tompkins’ original trial in 1985. Justice Harry…

Utah’s Supreme Court recently expressed concern that the lack of qualified defense attorneys for indigent death row inmates could unravel capital sentences. In a unanimous decision in the case of death row inmate Michael Archuleta, Associate Chief Justice Michael Wilkins (pictured) said the court might be forced to reverse capital sentences because the low pay and the complexity of such cases have shrunk the pool of Utah attorneys who will accept them. “It falls to us, as the court of last…

A recent editorial in The Virginian-Pilot points to the problem of arbitrariness in applying the death penalty. The editorial asks, “Is it right to look at who the victims were? Is it fair to consider the strength of the evidence and the time and resources required to pursue the death penalty, a costly process? Does it make a crime less important, a victim’s life less memorable, if prosecutors decide that life in a tiny prison cell is punishment enough for the killer?” The editorial continues…

Professor Bruce Winick of the Miami School of Law has written an article arguing that the Supreme Court should extend the protection it presently offers to those with mental retardation and juveniles to offenders with severe mental illness, as well. In The Supreme Court’s Emerging Death Penalty Jurisprudence: Severe Mental Illness as the Next Frontier, Winick reviews the High Court’s analysis of capital punishment under the Eighth Amendment with a focus on when the Court has found the death…

The Death Penalty Information Center offers unique resources on its Web page Special from DPIC. Visitors will find useful features and research materials, including: Curricula for High School and College classes A special student resource page 2007 Year End Report: Overview of all 2007 developments in the death penalty. 2007 News Article Index: An index arranged by topic of some of the important news articles on capital punishment from 2007 Resources for Communities of Faith Death Penalty in…

On November 3, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear a non-capital case from Alaska in which the defendant asserts that the constitution requires the state to allow DNA testing on evidence from his trial so that he can prove his innocence. In District Attorney’s Office v Osborne (No 08 – 6), the Court will initially consider whether William Osborne may bring a civil rights claim (under 42 USC 1983) demonstrating that the state has violated his constitutional right to due process by refusing to turn…

The number of federal death sentences has increased in the past seven years, while the number of state death sentences has declined. The size of the federal death row has tripled since 2000, while the number of people on state death rows has dropped. There has also been a marked increase in the number of people on the federal death row from states that do not have their own death penalty laws. From 1994 to 2000, there were 17 federal death sentences. From 2001 to 2007, there were 36 federal…

A North Carolina prosecutor has announced he will seek the death penalty in a case where the victim spoke out against capital punishment and her family opposes it. Before her death, college student and University of North Carolina student body president Eve Carson told fellow students gathered for a death penalty discussion that she did not agree with the death penalty due to the flaws in its application. She noted, “It doesn’t work, in my opinion.” After Carson’s murder, her family told Orange…

Jim Trainum, a police officer of over 25 years, recently discussed how shocked he was to discover how he and other officers were able to obtain a confession to murder from an innocent woman. Trainum explained, “Reviewing the tapes years later, I saw that we had fallen into a classic trap. We ignored evidence that our suspect might not have been guilty, and during the interrogation we inadvertently fed her details of the crime that she repeated back to us in her confession.” Detective Trainum…