Publications & Testimony

Despite seri­ous doubts that he mur­dered off-duty police offi­cer Mark Allen MacPhail in 1989, Troy Davis is fac­ing exe­cu­tion in Georgia on July 17. Davis was con­vict­ed main­ly on the basis of eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mo­ny. Since then, sev­en of the nine key wit­ness­es against him have recant­ed or changed their state­ments. Three of those wit­ness­es have filed sworn state­ments alleg­ing that Sylvester ​“Red” Coles, anoth­er key pros­e­cu­tion wit­ness, had con­fessed to killing MacPhail. Davis’ defense attorneys…

According to a new report released by the Tennessee Justice Project, indi­gent defense attor­neys in the state receive far few­er dol­lars and ​“in-kind” resources than pros­e­cu­tors. This dis­crep­an­cy cre­ates an uneven play­ing field that under­mines the pub­lic’s con­fi­dence in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. The report, Resources of the Prosecution and Indigent Defense Functions in Tennessee, is based on find­ings from a study con­duct­ed by The Spangenberg Group, one of the nation’s lead­ing experts on…

Eleven years after super­vis­ing his first exe­cu­tion as at the Florida State Prison at Starke, for­mer war­den Ron McAndrew is urg­ing an end to the death penal­ty. McAndrew is call­ing on states to aban­don cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and replace it with life with­out parole, a pun­ish­ment he notes is worse than the death penal­ty and pro­tects states from exe­cut­ing an inno­cent per­son. He observes, “(T)he most severe pun­ish­ment you could ever give any­one would be to lock them in a lit­tle cage made out of…

On June 9, 2007 the Death Penalty Information Center released its new report, ​“A Crisis of Confidence: Americans’ Doubts About the Death Penalty.” The report, based on results from DPIC’s nation­al pub­lic opin­ion poll, received exten­sive nation­al media cov­er­age in major papers and elec­tron­ic media. In addi­tion, the report was dis­cussed exten­sive­ly on more than 25 Internet blogs, includ­ing many online crim­i­nal jus­tice groups. Among the news orga­ni­za­tions that fea­tured this sto­ry were the…

The July 2007 issue of Scientific American mag­a­zine con­tains both an arti­cle dis­cussing the med­ical impli­ca­tions of lethal injec­tion and an edi­to­r­i­al dis­cussing the humane­ness of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment gen­er­al­ly. The edi­to­r­i­al sug­gests that cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment ​“can nev­er be any­thing but inhu­mane,” and offers the opin­ion that it is ​“wrong” and an ​“out­rage.” But it fur­ther states that even those who believe the death penal­ty is accept­able, should agree that it not be car­ried out cru­el­ly. The…

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on June 28, 2007, that Scott Panetti, a man with severe men­tal ill­ness on Texas’s death row, deserves a rehear­ing on his claim of men­tal incom­pe­tence. The Court’s 5 – 4 rul­ing over­turned a deci­sion by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that had used an over­ly restric­tive def­i­n­i­tion of what con­sti­tutes insan­i­ty. The low­er court had held that mere knowl­edge of one’s crime, with­out a ratio­nal under­stand­ing, was suf­fi­cient to allow an exe­cu­tion to go…

The fed­er­al death penal­ty impacts racial minori­ties dif­fer­ent­ly than it does whites accord­ing to a recent report from the American Civil Liberties Union. The report, The Persistent Problem of Racial Disparities in the Federal Death Penalty, notes that defen­dants of col­or make up the major­i­ty of the fed­er­al death row. And the risk of a case being autho­rized for the death penal­ty is 84% high­er in cas­es where the vic­tim is white, regard­less of the race of the defen­dant. The report pointed to…

On June 25, 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review a cap­i­tal case from Louisiana in which an all-white jury sen­tenced a defen­dant to death after the pros­e­cu­tor urged a death sen­tence so that the defen­dant would not ​“get away with it” like O.J. Simpson. All five qual­i­fied African-Americans had been struck from the jury pool by the pros­e­cu­tion using peremp­to­ry chal­lenges. The defense has chal­lenged the selec­tion of the jury as a vio­la­tion of equal pro­tec­tion. The…