Publications & Testimony

Support for restora­tion of the death penal­ty in Great Britain, even when the mur­der vic­tim is a police offi­cer, has fall­en below 50% for the first time since its abo­li­tion four decades ago. According to a YouGov poll con­duct­ed for The Daily Telegraph, the num­ber of peo­ple who oppose cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment even when the vic­tim is a police offi­cer has risen to 43%. The fig­ure is a dra­mat­ic changed from the 20% who voiced oppo­si­tion to the death penal­ty in a 1960 poll con­duct­ed by Gallup. Only 49%…

A Virginia judge ruled that pros­e­cu­tors may not seek the death penal­ty against a Vietnamese man accused of mur­der­ing two peo­ple because police vio­lat­ed the man’s rights under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by not inform­ing him that he could con­tact his coun­try’s con­sulate. “[T]he duty to give notice is absolute.… [T]he idea that the state can com­plete­ly ignore its treaty oblig­a­tions with­out con­se­quence essen­tial­ly oblit­er­ates the pur­pose for which the rights under the Vienna…

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 People’s Supreme Court would reclaim…

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 upholding Allen’s…

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 November 2005, the same poll found…

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 it once…

Former Death Row Inmate Acquitted at…

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 ones on death…