Publications & Testimony

North Carolina is poised to become the first state to estab­lish an Innocence Inquiry Commission that would review inmates’ inno­cence claims. Legislation to cre­ate the pan­el recent­ly passed the state Senate by a vote of 48 – 1, and it passed last year in the House of Representative by a vote of 80 – 23. The leg­is­la­tion now must go before a leg­isla­tive con­fer­ence to rec­on­cile dif­fer­ences between the ver­sions. The House ver­sion of the bill would establish…

According to a report by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News, the police sergeant in charge of the inves­ti­ga­tion that led to the pos­si­ble wrong­ful exe­cu­tion of Ruben Cantu in Texas had a record of wrong­ful arrests and was sus­pend­ed three times for errors in judg­ment dur­ing his three decades with the San Antonio Police Department. Official doc­u­ments exam­ined by the papers revealed that Sergeant Bill Ewell, who super­vised the homi­cide unit and was one of the…

A new report issued by the American Bar Association’s Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project found that Alabama’s death penal­ty fails to meet fun­da­men­tal ABA stan­dards of fair­ness and accu­ra­cy. An eight-mem­ber assess­ment team assem­bled in Alabama by the ABA was so trou­bled by its find­ings that it called for a mora­to­ri­um on executions…

Anna Quindlen, writ­ing in the June 26, 2006 issue of Newsweek, reflect­ed on the under­ly­ing ques­tions surrounding the…

A new study exam­ined all cas­es in which the death penal­ty was sought in Colorado over a 20-year peri­od, from 1980 to 1999. The study iden­ti­fied 110 death penal­ty cas­es, and com­pared the race and gen­der of the vic­tims. The authors con­clud­ed that the death penal­ty was most like­ly to be sought for homi­cides with white female vic­tims. They also deter­mined that the prob­a­bil­i­ty of death being sought was 4.2 times high­er for those who killed whites than for those who…

A June 2006 TNS Poll (released by the Washington Post and ABC News) found lit­tle change in American opin­ion on the death penal­ty over the past three years. Sixty-five per­cent of American adults still favor the death penal­ty for per­sons con­vict­ed of mur­der. Despite this, when respon­dents were giv­en a choice between the sen­tenc­ing options of life with­out parole and the death penal­ty, 46% favored life with­out parole. Fifty per­cent of respon­dents, how­ev­er, select­ed the death…

Professor Michael Meltsner, who worked as an attor­ney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in its efforts to chal­lenge the death penal­ty in the 1960s and 70s, recent­ly assessed the U.S.‘s appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty over the past 30 years. He not­ed that today’s death penal­ty sys­tem is​“bro­ken” and fails to make the nation a safer soci­ety. Writing in the Boston Globe,…

In a recent op-ed, Jack Fuller, for­mer edi­tor and pub­lish­er of the Chicago Tribune, called for an end to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Citing a series of mis­takes by eye­wit­ness­es, police and foren­sic experts, he stat­ed that the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem is too deeply flawed to entrust with car­ry­ing out exe­cu­tions. Pointing to the like­ly inno­cence of Carlos DeLuna, a Texas man who was exe­cut­ed in 1989, Fuller con­clud­ed that the death penal­ty should be abol­ished because​“no…

Dr. Orin Guidry, pres­i­dent of the 40,000-member American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA), issued a pub­lic state­ment strong­ly urg­ing mem­bers to​“steer clear” of any par­tic­i­pa­tion in exe­cu­tions by lethal injec­tion. In a four-page​“Message from the President,” Guidry not­ed that anes­the­si­ol­o­gists have been​“reluc­tant­ly thrust into the mid­dle” of the legal con­tro­ver­sy over lethal injec­tions. In recent months, the pro­ce­dures being used around the United States…

The Anniston StarSection: OpinionJuly 2, 2006Author: Richard C. DieterSpecial to The StarIn decid­ing a nar­row issue about an obscure part of Kansas’ death penal­ty law, the Supreme Court last week revealed a chasm of dif­fer­ing opin­ions regard­ing the fun­da­men­tal reli­a­bil­i­ty of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in this coun­try. Although the oppos­ing views were wide­ly diver­gent and sharply expressed, the court did us all a ser­vice by iden­ti­fy­ing the key prob­lem that may decide the…