Publications & Testimony

In April 2001, Governor Huckabee signed a law providing for Defense Counsel Standards and DNA testing.

After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Arizona’s death penalty statute in Ring v. Arizona, the state legislature met in a special session to amend the state’s death penalty law to provide that jurors, not judges, impose death sentences. The bill passed and was signed by Governor Jane Hull. (Tucson Citizen, editorial, August 6, 2002) In April 2001, Governor Jane Hull signed a law banning the execution of those with mental retardation. The legislation sets general guidelines for a judge to…

On May 20, 2001, Governor Siegelman signed a law creating the Committee on Compensation for Wrongful Incarceration allowing reparations to be made in the event that an innocent person is convicted and imprisoned erroneously.

On Tuesday, Dec. 4, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in Snyder v. Louisiana, a case involving a black defendant sentenced to death by an all-white jury after the prosecution used its peremptory strikes to exclude all of the qualified black jurors. During Allen Snyder’s 1996 trial for the murder of a man his estranged wife was dating, prosecutor James Williams of Jefferson Parish urged the all-white jury to sentence the defendant to death so that Snyder would not “get away with it”…

In a recent op-ed in the New Jersey Daily Record, Jim O’Brien detailed his experiences with the legal system as the father of a murder victim. His daughter Deidre was murdered in 1982, and the capital trials and appeals for the man convicted of the crime lasted another 8 years. O’Brien stated, “I’ve lived through the state’s process of trying to kill [a murderer], and I can say without hesitation that it is not worth the anguish that it puts survivors through….” Because of the “horrendous toll”…

If current trends continue, New York City will likely have fewer than 500 homicides this year, the lowest number in a 12-month period since reliable NYC Police Department statistics became available in 1963. As of November 18, 2007, the police department logged 428 killings, the majority of which were committed by friends or acquaintances or were drug or gang-related. In fact, only 35 homicides this year were committed by strangers to the victims, a number described as “microscopic” in a city…

The New York Times investigated the post-exoneration lives of the 206 former inmates who were wrongfully convicted and released through DNA evidence. Fifty-three of the cases involved murder convictions, and more than 25% of those wrongfully convicted had given a false confession or incriminating statement. Working from a list provided by the Innocence Project, the Times gathered information on 137 of the 206 exonerees and were able to interview 115 of those. They found that most DNA-exonerees…

In a recent article in the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Dr. Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia University describes numerous serious errors in recent deterrence studies, including improper statistical analyses and missing data and variables that are necessary to give a full picture of the criminal justice system. Fagan writes, “There is no reliable, scientifically sound evidence that [shows that executions] can exert a deterrent effect…. These flaws and omissions in a body of scientific evidence…

Norm Stamper, a 35-year veteran police officer from San Diego, recently wrote in The Mercury News that from his experience, “the death penalty is inefficient and extravagantly expensive.” Instead of spending millions of dollars on the death penalty, Stamper writes, “Spending scarce public resources on after-school programs, mental health care, drug and alcohol treatment, education, more crime labs and new technologies, or on hiring more police officers, would truly help create safer…

The journal of Criminology & Public Policy recently asked leading experts to recommend important policy changes needed in the area of criminal justice and to provide the evidence to support such change. Although most of the articles addressed various prison and treatment issues, the first article by Prof. James Acker of the University at Albany called for an immediate moratorium on executions. Prof. Acker examines the United States’ long history of grappling with the death penalty. He concludes…