Publications & Testimony

Monday, October 2, 2006The Chaos Behind California ExecutionsTrial tes­ti­mo­ny paints lethal injec­tion meth­ods as hap­haz­ard, with lit­tle med­ical over­sight.By Maura Dolan and Henry WeinsteinLos Angeles Times Staff WritersSAN JOSE — ​“Operational Procedure No. 770,” the state’s name for exe­cu­tion by lethal injec­tion, is per­formed in a dark, cramped room by men and women who know lit­tle, if any­thing, about the dead­ly drugs they inject under extreme stress.Thousands of pages of…

One attor­ney’s appeal brief on behalf of a Texas death row inmate was so poor­ly writ­ten that State District Judge Noe Gonzalez of Edinburg wrote that ​“Applicant total­ly mis­in­ter­prets what actu­al­ly occurred in this case.” A com­mit­tee of cit­i­zens and attor­neys filed a com­plaint about the appel­late lawyer with the State Bar of Texas, but noth­ing was done: the lawyer remains on the state’s list of approved death penal­ty attor­neys, and the client remains on death row. The prob­lem is widespread and…

The Charlotte School of Law is spon­sor­ing a sym­po­sium on ​“Mental Illness and the Death Penalty: Seeking a ​‘Reasoned Moral Response’ to an Unavoidable Condition” on October 20, 2006 in Charlotte, North Carolina. The con­fer­ence will bring togeth­er med­ical experts, judges, defense attor­neys, pros­e­cu­tors, and oth­er experts to dis­cuss whether cur­rent law ade­quate­ly accounts for the role of men­tal ill­ness in cap­i­tal cas­es. Among those sched­uled to speak are James Coleman of Duke…

The for­mer Director of the FBI, William Sessions (pic­tured), along with Timothy Lewis, a for­mer judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals, called on mem­bers of Congress to refrain from bar­ring death row inmates and oth­er defen­dants from the full access to the fed­er­al courts in their appeals. Some leg­is­la­tors have pro­posed elim­i­nat­ing fed­er­al habeas cor­pus review in many cas­es, and bar­ring access to the fed­er­al courts to many of those rais­ing chal­lenges to their…

The lat­est edi­tion of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s ​“Death Row USA” shows that the num­ber of peo­ple on the death row in the United States is con­tin­u­ing to decline, falling to 3,366 as of July 1, 2006. The size of death row increased every year between 1976 and 2000, but since then it has been in a slow…

The FBI recent­ly released the lat­est ver­sion of its Uniform Crime Reports: Crime in the United States 2005. The report showed that the mur­der rate in 2005 (5.6 mur­ders per 100,000 peo­ple) was the same as in 2001, with lit­tle change in the inter­ven­ing years. Death sen­tences, exe­cu­tions and the size of death row all declined dur­ing this peri­od. As in pre­vi­ous years, the South had the high­erst mur­der rate, 6.6, among the 4 geo­graph­i­cal regions. Over 80% of the exe­cu­tions in the…

State Assemblyman Nelson T. Albano of Cape May, New Jersey, announced at a forum on the death penal­ty that he has changed his mind and now oppos­es cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Albano said that his change of heart came after read­ing a book about Kirk Bloodsworth, the 1^st death-row inmate in the United States to be exon­er­at­ed by DNA evi­dence. The book led him to the insight into that the cap­i­tal-pun­ish­ment sys­tem is flawed and should be put on…

In an arti­cle enti­tled The Death Penalty: No Evidence for Deterrence, John Donnohue and Justin Wolfers exam­ined recent sta­tis­ti­cal stud­ies that claimed to show a deter­rent effect from the death penal­ty. The authors con­clude that the esti­mates claim­ing that the death penal­ty saves numer­ous lives ​“are sim­ply not cred­i­ble.” In fact, the authors state that using the same data and prop­er method­ol­o­gy could lead to the exact oppo­site con­clu­sion: that is, that the death penalty actually…

At a hear­ing in fed­er­al District Court in Maryland, Dr. Mark Heath, an anes­the­si­ol­o­gist and assis­tant pro­fes­sor at Columbia University, tes­ti­fied that those des­ig­nat­ed to car­ry out lethal injec­tions in the state were unpre­pared and unqual­i­fied for the task. ​“The total­i­ty of all their knowl­edge is gross­ly inad­e­quate,” Heath stat­ed. Sworn tes­ti­mo­ny from mem­bers of the exe­cu­tion team was shown at the hear­ing. In one video­taped seg­ment, the doc­tor who was respon­si­ble for declar­ing that executed…

DPIC’s Lethal Injection Page ABA Report Finds Serious Problems in Florida’s Capital Punishment System A new report issued by the American Bar Association’s Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project found that Florida’s appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty fails to com­ply with ABA stan­dards to ensure fair­ness and accu­ra­cy. This report was com­piled by an eight-mem­ber team com­posed of crim­i­nal jus­tice experts from Florida. The report cites prob­lems in numerous areas,…