Publications & Testimony

A nine-mem­ber death penal­ty assess­ment team appoint­ed by the American Bar Association​’s (ABA) Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project has deter­mined that Arizona​’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment laws are plagued with seri­ous prob­lems and that the state should imme­di­ate­ly take steps to improve the fair­ness and accu­ra­cy of the sys­tem. A report issued by the assess­ment team iden­ti­fied sig­nif­i­cant prob­lems, includ­ing the lack of a cen­tral­ized system of…

A recent edi­tion of the Journal of Catholic Legal Studies con­tains arti­cles from a symposium on ​“Catholics and the Death Penalty: Lawyers, Jurors & Judges.” In addi­tion to a fore­word by Amelia Uelmen and an intro­duc­tion to Catholic teach­ing on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment by Art Cody, the vol­ume con­tains a pan­el dis­cus­sion with Kevin Doyle, direc­tor of the New York Capital Defender Office, and Charles Hynes, the District Attorney of Kings County (NY). The symposium…

Five books address­ing reli­gion and its role in cop­ing with vio­lent crime are now avail­able:​“Healing Violent Men: A Model for Christian Communities” — This book by reli­gion pro­fes­sor David Livingston explores domes­tic vio­lence. It offers prac­ti­cal advice for pas­toral and pro­gram­mat­ic efforts to embrace the twin Christian imper­a­tives of for­give­ness and respon­si­b­li­ty. (Fortress Press, 2002).​“When Violence is No Stranger: Pastoral Counseling with Survivors of…

Stuart Streichler served as a law clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit short­ly after the U.S. Supreme Court’s rul­ing in Gregg v. Georgia. He observed many cap­i­tal cas­es and now con­cludes:​“A fun­da­men­tal idea of American law is that all defen­dants should receive fair tri­als all of the time. The per­sis­tent fail­ure to come close to that in death penal­ty cas­es under­mines the integri­ty of the legal sys­tem.” Streichler’s op-ed appreared recently in…

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…