Publications & Testimony

The Texas Department of Public Safety recently hired Vanessa Nelson despite her being under investigation at the Houston Police Department Crime Lab where she was the former DNA supervisor. Nelson resigned from the Houston Lab to avoid being fired for giving her subordinates the answers to a DNA skills proficiency test. The Houston Lab has a history of problems with its DNA lab, including poor training and inadequate work, causing the division to be shut down in 2002. Three men who were…

Maryland Judge Joseph P. Manck sought to lessen the pain and frustration to the victims’ family by sentencing a defendant to life in prison without the possibility of parole instead of the death penalty. In choosing a life sentence for Brandon Morris for the murder of correctional officer Jeffrey Wroten, Judge Manck noted that appeals in death penalty cases can stretch on for years. He cited one case that has been going on for 25 years and said that victims’ families often must sit through…

Alton Logan was sentenced to life in prison for the 1982 murder of a security guard in a McDonald’s restaurant in Illinois. The state had originally sought the death penalty. New information in the form of a confession has now come forward from an attorney in another case indicating that Logan may not be guilty of the crime. Soon after the restaurant murder, two Chicago police officers were shot to death, and a man named Andrew Wilson was charged with their murder. Wilson was asked by his…

At recent Congressional hearings, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee questioned the Department of Justice as to why it has not approved any grants under the Kirk Bloodsworth DNA Post-Conviction Testing Program. Part of the Innocence Protection Act of 2004, the purpose of the program was to help defray DNA testing costs through grants to individual states. It has had congressional funding of almost $14 million over the past three years, but has failed to dole out any of the funds. Kirk…

The Inter Press Service, with the assistance of the European Commission, has recently published “Crime and Justice: Abolishing the Death Penalty,” collecting more than 100 reports from dozens of countries and every continent. IPS used the voices of those who work directly with the death penalty issue to present a world-wide picture of the status of capital punishment. The stories told in the report are from activists, academics, lawyers and death row inmates. They range from dispatches from…

The Richmond Times-Dispatch, a key paper in the Virginia state capital, has long supported the death penalty. But their recent editorial takes the position that capital punishment “achieves no legitimate goals that cannot be achieved by a life sentence with no possibility of parole.” The paper equates the death penalty with the state “playing God.” The full text of the editorial follows: Del. Frank Hargrove, one of the General Assembly’s Don Quixotes, hopes the umpteenth time will be the…

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently uncovered hospital files indicating that Dr. Alan R. Doerhoff, a Missouri physician who assisted with the state’s executions and who developed the state’s lethal injection protocol, gave misleading answers during a 1999 malpractice suit about having his hospital privileges revoked. In 1998, Doerhoff’s medical privileges were revoked from the Lake of the Ozarks General Hospital. Doerhoff was also denied privileges at St. Mary’s Health Center in Jefferson City…

In an op-ed in the Fort-Worth Star-Telegram, police chief James Abbott stated that the death penalty is broken beyond repair and that the extra money spent pursuing executions could be better spent on crime prevention and the needs of victims. Abbott is the Police Chief of West Orange, New Jersey, and he served on the New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission. He was a longtime supporter of the death penalty but eventually concluded that abolition was “just plain common sense.” Chief Abbott…

Daryl Atkins, the defendant in the 2002 Supreme Court case (Atkins v. Virginia) that banned the execution of the mentally retarded, had his death sentence reduced to life without parole after a Virginia judge heard that evidence had been withheld from his trial attorneys. Sentenced to death for the 1996 robbery and murder of Eric Nesbitt, Atkins received much attention because of his mental limitations and the question of whether it was constitutional to execute those with mental retardation.