Publications & Testimony

The Death Penalty Subcommittee of the Committee on Public Defense of the Washington State Bar has pre­pared a report on the state’s death penal­ty that will be sub­mit­ted to the Bar Association’s Board of Governors in ear­ly 2007. The Subcommittee was formed to exam­ine the costs of the state’s death penal­ty and to rec­om­mend whether the death penal­ty should be con­tin­ued, giv­en the expens­es and the state’s expe­ri­ence in car­ry­ing out death sen­tences. The Death Penalty Subcommittee…

The Bureau of Justice Statistics has just released the 2005 ver­sion of its annu­al report on the death penal­ty in the U.S. The report notes that both the num­ber of death sen­tences and the size of death row were down for 2005, and that this rep­re­sents a trend over the past 5 years. The report states that there were 60 exe­cu­tions in 2005, all by lethal injec­tion, and that the time between sen­tenc­ing and exe­cu­tion was longer in 2005…

On December 5, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania intro­duced leg­is­la­tion (S. 4081) to restore the right to habeas cor­pus to those deemed to be ene­my com­bat­ants and who are fac­ing tri­al before mil­i­tary com­mis­sions, includ­ing those being detained at the U.S. Guantanamo prison in Cuba. Habeas cor­pus pro­vides an avenue for inmates in deten­tion to chal­lenge the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of their con­fine­ment. The roots of this protection…

Recently in Ohio and oth­er states, some inmates chal­leng­ing the lethal injec­tion process in fed­er­al courts have been giv­en stays of exe­cu­tions, while oth­ers, sim­i­lar­ly sit­u­at­ed, have been denied stays and have been exe­cut­ed. This incon­sis­tent appli­ca­tion of fed­er­al law in cap­i­tal cas­es has raised con­cerns among a num­ber of fed­er­al judges. A stay was recent­ly grant­ed to Ohio inmate Jerome Henderson, but denied to Jeffrey Lundgren. On December 6, U.S. District…

Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights will release a new report on December 10 entitled ​“Creating More Victims: How Executions Hurt the Families Left Behind.” Families of the exe­cut­ed are vic­tims, too, accord­ing to the new report, which draws upon the sto­ries of three dozen fam­i­ly mem­bers of inmates exe­cut­ed in the United States and demon­strates that their expe­ri­ences and trau­mat­ic symp­toms resem­ble those of many oth­ers who have suf­fered a violent loss.

Stays have been grant­ed in two of the three exe­cu­tions that had still been sched­uled for December. On December 1 in Ohio, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6^th Circuit grant­ed a stay of exe­cu­tion to Jerome Henderson, whose exe­cu­tion had been sched­uled for December 5. Henderson was allowed to join a chal­lenge to the state’s lethal injec­tion pro­to­col. The 6^th Circuit denied the state’s request to rehear the issue, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to lift the stay.

According to the November 2006 edi­tion of the Texas Bar Journal pub­lished by the State Bar of Texas, the State Bar has adopt­ed a Texas ver­sion of the American Bar Association’s Guidelines for the Appointment and Performance of Defense Counsel in Death Penalty Cases. The intro­duc­tion to the Texas Guidelines…

A recent arti­cle in the Cornell Law Review argues that state death penal­ty laws that allow the death penal­ty for the crime of rape of a child where no death occurs may be…

Supreme Court and the Death Penalty The U.S. Supreme Court will be hear­ing four death penal­ty cas­es in January 2007: SCHRIRO V. LANDRIGAN, No. 05 – 1575 This Arizona case will be argued on January 9. The Court will decide whether defense coun­sel has a duty to devel­op and offer evi­dence favor­able to the client in a death penal­ty case when the client active­ly oppos­es pre­sen­ta­tion of such mit­i­gat­ing evi­dence. On a habeas cor­pus peti­tion, the U.S. Court of…

In a rul­ing that may put all exe­cu­tions on hold in the state of Kentucky, a Franklin County Circuit Judge held that the state must hold pub­lic hear­ings because it changed the way the state plans to car­ry out exe­cu­tions. A group of death row inmates had chal­lenged the state’s lethal injec­tion pro­to­col in 2004, and sub­se­quent­ly the state altered the mix­ture of drugs used and the way they would be admin­is­tered with­out going through the necessary administrative…