Publications & Testimony

In the wake of numer­ous law­suits chal­leng­ing cur­rent lethal injec­tion pro­ce­dures and a recent U.S. Supreme Court rul­ing that makes it eas­i­er for those on death row to file such claims, med­ical experts have iden­ti­fied alter­na­tive pro­to­cols that would be less risky to the pris­on­er but more dif­fi­cult for wit­ness­es to observe.​“There’s an innu­mer­ably long list of med­ica­tions that can be giv­en to cause some­one to die,” said Dr. Mark Dershwitz, a professor of…

The…

According to the FBI’s Preliminary Uniform Crime Report for 2005, all regions of the coun­try expe­ri­enced a rise in mur­der rates in 2005. The Midwest had the largest increase (5.8%) and the West had the small­est increase (3.2%). Based on the increas­es report­ed by the FBI and the pre­vi­ous year’s mur­der rates, the South again had the high­est mur­der rate in the coun­try– 6.9 mur­ders per 100,000 peo­ple – fol­lowed by the West (5.9), Midwest (5.0) and the Northeast (4.4). The…

The League of Women Voters of the United States has adopt­ed an offi­cial nation­al pol­i­cy call­ing for abo­li­tion of the death penal­ty. During the orga­ni­za­tion’s 47^th bien­ni­al nation­al con­ven­tion in Minneapolis, del­e­gates adopt­ed pol­i­cy lan­guage stat­ing,​“The League of Women Voters of the United States sup­ports the abo­li­tion of the death penal­ty.” The League of Women Voters has more than 130,000 mem­bers and sup­port­ers. It is a non-partisan political…

July 2, 2006 will mark the 30^th anniver­sary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s deci­sion in Gregg v. Georgia, an his­toric rul­ing that upheld new­ly craft­ed death penal­ty statutes and sig­naled the begin­ning of the mod­ern era of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. This mile­stone presents the pub­lic with an oppor­tu­ni­ty to exam­ine the appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty over the past three decades and to test whether the Court’s expec­ta­tion of a fair­er and less arbi­trary sys­tem of capital…

The U.S. Supreme has expand­ed the abil­i­ty of death row inmates to chal­lenge their con­vic­tions in fed­er­al court based on DNA evi­dence pro­duced long after their tri­als. The rul­ing marks the first time that the Justices have con­sid­ered the new evi­den­tiary tech­nol­o­gy of DNA evi­dence when re-exam­­in­ing a death sen­tence. In its 5 – 3 deci­sion, the Court held that new evi­dence, includ­ing DNA test results, raised suf­fi­cient doubt to mer­it a new hear­ing in federal court…

Recent edi­to­ri­als in The Washington Post and Roanoke Times praised Virginia Governor Tim Kaine’s deci­sion to delay the exe­cu­tion of Percy Walton in order to ensure that he is sane enough to exe­cute. The papers not­ed that Kaine’s deci­sion, which drew crit­i­cism from some death penal­ty advo­cates, demon­strat­ed​“com­pe­tence in law­ful­ly apply­ing the death penal­ty” and was…

The U.S. Supreme Court has unan­i­mous­ly ruled that death row inmates seek­ing to chal­lenge lethal injec­tion as a method of exe­cu­tion after they have exhaust­ed their reg­u­lar appeals may pur­sue the issue as a civ­il rights claim. Though the deci­sion in Hill v. McDonough did not answer the broad­er ques­tion regard­ing whether the chem­i­cals used in lethal injec­tions around the nation are uncon­sti­tu­tion­al because they may cause excru­ci­at­ing pain, it does per­mit inmates to…

Monday, June 12, 2006BY RICHARD…

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 in the state. The team urged law­mak­ers to take action to ensure effec­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tion at every stage of the capital…