Publications & Testimony

The Fall 2006 edition of the Golden Gate University Law Review contains papers from the recent Symposium entitled “The Faces of Wrongful Conviction” that was held at UCLA in April 2006. The journal includes articles by Simon Cole on fingerprint evidence, by Alexandra Natapoff on the use of snitches, by Craig Haney on expanding beyond innocence when examining injustices in capital cases, and by Thomas Sullivan on the recording of custodial interviews. (37 Golden Gate Law Review 1 (2006)). See…

The Austin American-Statesman conducted an extensive study of the quality of representation that death row inmates receive in Texas. The study concluded that: Sheltered by an indifferent Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, lawyers appointed to handle appeals for death row inmates routinely bungle the job, submitting work that falls far below professional standards, frequently at taxpayer expense. Some appeals are incomplete, incomprehensible or improperly argued. Others are duplicated, poorly…

The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty will hold its national conference at the Fair Lakes Hyatt Hotel in Fairfax, Virginia, October 26 – 29, 2006. The NCADP consists of a wide spectrum of groups and individuals opposed to the death penalty. Among the speakers at this year’s event are Theodore Shaw, President of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Hugo A. Bedau, author and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Tufts University, and numerous individuals who were exonerated and…

“The Dreams of Ada” by Robert Mayer tells a story strikingly similar to that recounted by John Grisham in “The Innocent Man.” Each book involves the murder of a young woman from Ada, Oklahoma in the early 1980s. In both cases, there are two defendants whose convictions rely on little probative evidence but involve “confessions” that emerged from a dream. Both prosecutions were led by Bill Peterson and both involved the same jail-house informant. The defendants in Mayer’s book, Tommy Ward and…

Judge Carolyn Dineen King of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit was the main speaker at the “Red Mass” on October 4 at the Catholic cathedral in Corpus Christi, Texas. The Red Mass is an annual liturgy held for members of the legal profession near the beginning of the judicial term. Its traditions extend back to 13^th century Europe. Judge King spoke about the death penalty, both from her perspective as a judge and as a Catholic. In both areas, she raised strong concerns about the…

A recent law review article by Prof. Michael Mannheimer of the Salmon P. Chase College of Law argues that the federal penalty may violate the Eighth Amendment’s proscription against cruel and unusual punishments when it is used in states that do not have the death penalty. Prof. Mannheimer explores the strain of the Eighth Amendment’s history that is specifically concerned with limiting the federal government’s power to interfere with the norms of individual states. He also notes that there has…

Dennis Counterman was freed from a Pennsylvania courtroom on October 18, 2006 after serving many years on the state’s death row. Counterman had been convicted and sentenced to death in 1990 for allegedly setting a fire in his own house that resulted in the death of his three children. That conviction was overturned in 2001 because prosecutors had withheld evidence from the defense indicating that the oldest child had a history of fire-setting. At Counterman’s orignial trial, the prosecution…

In a recent speech to law students from Furman University, William W. Wilkins, the Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, expressed doubts about the value of the death penalty given its high costs and probable lack of deterrence. He also noted that the existence of the death penalty in the U.S. makes it very difficult to extradite suspects from foreign countries who oppose capital punishment. With respect to the extra costs attibutable to capital cases, Wilkins noted…

The Common Sense Foundation of North Carolina released a study on October 11, 2006 that found that at least 37 people now on death row had trial lawyers who would not have met today’s minimum standards of qualification. Nearly a third of the cases where sufficient data was available fell into this substandard category. The study also lists the names of 16 people who have been executed whose trial lawyers did not meet these same standards. Over half of the executions in the state where data was…

On October 13, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear two capital cases from Texas in which the defendant was sentenced to death after the jury was given instructions that the Court has since found unconstitutional. Unlike in most states where the jury considers a range of aggravating and mitigating circumstances about the crime and the defendant before choosing a sentence of life or death, in Texas the jury was (the law has since been modified) given a series of yes-or-no questions about the…