Publications & Testimony

Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins announced that he will be reexamining nearly 40 death penalty convictions in his county. No executions will occur in the county until he has reviewed the cases in detail. Watkins said he will start with the oldest cases as they are most likely to be scheduled first. “I’m not saying I’m putting a moratorium on the death penalty,” said Watkins. “It’s saying that maybe we should withdraw those dates and look at those cases from a new perspective to…

According to the F.B.I.’s latest crime report released on September 15, the South is the only region in the country that experienced a rise in its murder rate in 2007. The FBI reported that the murder rate in the country declined to 5.6 murders per 100,000 people in 2007 from 5.7 in 2006, and the rate declined in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West. In the South, however, the murder rate increased from 6.8 in 2006 to 7.0 in 2007, the highest rate among the four regions. The South…

UPDATE: Parole Board Denied Clemency on Sept. 16 and Jack Alderman was executed. On September 15, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Melvin Westmoreland granted a stay of execution for Jack Alderman in Georgia. Judge Westmoreland stayed the execution, scheduled for Sept. 16, until Alderman receives a “meaningful” meeting with the state’s Board of Pardons. The judge stated: “If the state’s going to impose the extreme penalty of death … due process of the law is never more important.” Alderman…

The U.S. Supreme Court will return to hear oral arguments in its new term on October 6. To date, the Court has granted certiorari in (agreed to hear) three death penalty cases. Bell v. Kelly will be argued on November 12, 2008. This case originated in Virginia and concerns the scope of federal review when the state court has failed to develop an issue. Edward Bell claimed that his attorney failed to present important mitigating evidence at this sentence hearing, but this claim was not fully…

A new study of the death penalty in Arkansas showed racial patterns in sentencing. University of Iowa law professor David Baldus’ study examined 124 murder cases filed in one district from 1990 to 2005. Even after adjusting for factors such as the defendant’s criminal history and circumstances of the crime, black people who killed white people were more likely than others to be charged with capital murder and be sentenced to death. “It suggests to us that there’s a real risk that race may have…

A recent Florida case indicates that the decision about who is the next person to be executed is more dependent on a few individuals in the governor’s office than on an orderly process. Richard Henyard is scheduled for execution this month although 198 other Florida death row inmates were sentenced to death before him. One such inmate, Gary Alvord, was sentenced to death two months before Henyard was born and has been on death row longer than any other inmate in the nation. When asked how the…

Maryland’s Commission on Capital Punishment continued with its fourth public hearing on September 5 in Annapolis. Experts testified about the additional costs of capital punishment compared to life-sentence cases, the risk of arbitrariness in death sentencing, the validity of recent deterrence studies, and the national trends away from the use of the death penalty in the U.S. There was also discussion about the number of current cases that do not have any DNA evidence to confirm or exclude…

UPDATE: CHARLES HOOD’S EXECUTION HAS BEEN STAYED BY THE TEXAS COURT OF CRIMINAL APPEALS. A Texas state judge has ordered a hearing into the accusation of an affair between the judge and the prosecutor in Charles Hood’s death penalty case. With a week to go before Hood’s execution date, the Texas Attorney General also called for a review of the fairness of the trial. The Attorney General, Greg Abbott, requested that the district court “thoroughly review the defendant’s claims before the…

Testimony of Richard C. Dieter, Executive Director, Death Penalty Information Center, before the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment regarding the costs of the death penalty and related issues (Sept. 5, 2008)