Publications & Testimony

Florida’s governor halted all executions in the state until a commission can investigate and report what went wrong with the lethal injection of Angel Nieves Diaz on December 13. Gov. Jeb Bush issued an executive order announcing a panel of experts to make recommendations for changes to the process and said that no death warrants will be signed until modifications are adopted. Diaz’s execution took more than twice as long as normal and required two rounds of the lethal chemicals. Witnesses…

DPIC’s 12^th annual Year End Report was released on December 14 and reveals a broad decline in the use of the death penalty in the U.S. based on a number of factors: the public now favors life without parole over the death penalty; the number of executions has dropped to the fewest in a decade, in part because of challenges to the lethal injection process; and the annual number of death sentences is now at a 30-year low. The report notes that various states have put a hold on all executions…

Although no jury has returned a death sentence in a federal case in Puerto Rico in modern times, more cases are pending, raising concerns among many citizens. Puerto Rico bars the death penalty in its constitution. However, a U.S. Court of Appeals decision in 2001 held that the federal death penalty can be applied there. This decision overturned a lower court that ruled the use of the federal death penalty in the Commonwealth would be unconstitutional. The issue has not been reviewed by the…

The Albany Democrat-Herald in Oregon recently editorialized that the “death penalty isn’t working,” and concluded “that the death penalty here is a pointless law. If we’re not going to apply this law, then getting rid of it would be the less expensive course.” The editorial cited the possibility of error, the arbitrariness of applying the punishment to some dangerous offenders but not others, and the difficulty of ever getting to an execution as reasons for ending capital punishment. The…

The Death Penalty Subcommittee of the Committee on Public Defense of the Washington State Bar has prepared a report on the state’s death penalty that will be submitted to the Bar Association’s Board of Governors in early 2007. The Subcommittee was formed to examine the costs of the state’s death penalty and to recommend whether the death penalty should be continued, given the expenses and the state’s experience in carrying out death sentences. The Death Penalty Subcommittee was made up of…

The Bureau of Justice Statistics has just released the 2005 version of its annual report on the death penalty in the U.S. The report notes that both the number of death sentences and the size of death row were down for 2005, and that this represents a trend over the past 5 years. The report states that there were 60 executions in 2005, all by lethal injection, and that the time between sentencing and execution was longer in 2005 than in 2004. California had the most death sentences (23) in…

On December 5, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania introduced legislation (S. 4081) to restore the right to habeas corpus to those deemed to be enemy combatants and who are facing trial before military commissions, including those being detained at the U.S. Guantanamo prison in Cuba. Habeas corpus provides an avenue for inmates in detention to challenge the constitutionality of their confinement. The roots of this protection go back to early English law…

Recently in Ohio and other states, some inmates challenging the lethal injection process in federal courts have been given stays of executions, while others, similarly situated, have been denied stays and have been executed. This inconsistent application of federal law in capital cases has raised concerns among a number of federal judges. A stay was recently granted to Ohio inmate Jerome Henderson, but denied to Jeffrey Lundgren. On December 6, U.S. District Court Judge Gregory Frost denied a…

Stays have been granted in two of the three executions that had still been scheduled for December. On December 1 in Ohio, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6^th Circuit granted a stay of execution to Jerome Henderson, whose execution had been scheduled for December 5. Henderson was allowed to join a challenge to the state’s lethal injection protocol. The 6^th Circuit denied the state’s request to rehear the issue, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to lift the stay. (Associated Press, Dec. 5…