Publications & Testimony

Amidst wide­spread sus­pi­cion that inno­cent peo­ple have been sen­tenced to death or exe­cut­ed, China has announced that reform­ing its death penal­ty sys­tem is a pri­or­i­ty and it is imple­ment­ing pro­ce­dur­al changes to pro­tect against wrong­ful con­vic­tions. In October 2005, the People’s Supreme Court announced that it would reverse a deci­sion from the ear­ly 1980’s that gave final review on many death penal­ty cas­es to provin­cial high courts. Under the new pol­i­cy, the…

Former California Supreme Court Justice Joseph Grodin and for­mer San Quentin war­den Daniel Vasquez are urg­ing California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant clemen­cy to Clarence Ray Allen. Allen, who will turn 76 just a day before his sched­uled exe­cu­tion on January 17, is blind and dis­abled, con­di­tions that his attor­neys have argued would make his exe­cu­tion cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment. In a let­ter to Schwarzenegger, Grodin, who authored the court’s 1986 opinion…

A recent pub­lic opin­ion poll of Australians found that 69% of respon­dents believe the penal­ty for mur­der should be impris­on­ment, while only 25% of those polled stat­ed it should be the death penal­ty. The poll, con­duct­ed by Roy Morgan International just one week after an Australian cit­i­zen was exe­cut­ed by Singapore for pos­sess­ing less than a half a kilo­gram of hero­in, revealed that pub­lic sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is con­tin­u­ing to decline in Australia. In…

The Washington Post edi­to­ri­al­ized about the death penal­ty in 2005, com­ment­ing on many of the points made in DPIC’s Year End Report:[T]he over­all ten­den­cy is unmis­tak­able: At least for now, with crime and mur­der rates low and the threat of wrong­ful con­vic­tions on peo­ple’s minds, the death penal­ty does not have the same attraction that…

Former Death Row Inmate Acquitted…

NEW RESOURCE: ACLU Expands Capital Punishment…

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Capital Consequences: Families of the Condemned Tell Their Stories is a new book by Rachel King of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project. The book focus­es on the impact that the death penal­ty has on the fam­i­lies of those who have been con­demned to die. King, who also wrote Don’t Kill in Our Names: Families of Murder Victims Speak Out Against the Death Penalty, describes these indi­vid­u­als as the unseen vic­tims of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and high­lights the expe­ri­ence of having loved…

“Hidden Victims,” a new book by soci­ol­o­gist Susan F. Sharp of the University of Oklahoma, exam­ines the impact of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment on the fam­i­lies of those fac­ing exe­cu­tion. Through a series of in-depth inter­views with fam­i­lies of the accused, Sharp illus­trates from a soci­o­log­i­cal stand­point how fam­i­ly mem­bers and friends of those on death row are, in effect, indi­rect vic­tims of the ini­tial crime. The book empha­sizes their respons­es to sen­tenc­ing, as well as…

Richard Pompelio (pic­tured) estab­lished the New Jersey Crime Victims Law Center (VLC) in 1992 after his 17-year-old son Tony was mur­dered. VLC pro­vides pro bono legal assis­tance to vic­tims of vio­lent crime. He recent­ly wrote in the New Jersey Lawyer’s The Law & More col­umn about the dis­ser­vice that the death penal­ty rep­re­sents to victims and…