Publications & Testimony

With the execution of Jesus Aguilar in Texas on May 24, there have now been 20 executions in 2006: 50% of the executions have been in Texas 75% have been in the South 75% of those executed were of minority race 62% of the victims in the underlying murders were white. At the current pace, there would be 48 executions in 2006, a decline from the 60 executions in 2005, though many executions have been stayed while courts consider the lethal injection process. (source: DPIC statistics, May 25…

John W. Whitehead, founder and president of the Rutherford Institute, called for clemency for Percy Lavar Walton, a Virginia inmate scheduled to be executed on June 8. Walton is a psychotic schizophrenic who has suffered with severe mental illness since adolescence. He is on death row for three murders he committed when he was 18 years old. Whitehead writes: Dubbed ​“Crazy Horse” by prison officials, Walton … is scarcely conscious of the fate that awaits him. While others on death row bide…

Girvies Davis was executed in Illinois in 1995 after a conviction based largely on his own confession. Davis’ appellate attorney was David A. Schwartz, who now serves as senior vice-president and baseball legal counsel at CSMG Sports. Schwartz writes in the Chicago Tribune that Davis ​“confessed” to many crimes, most of which he indisputably did not commit. Davis said that the only reason he confessed to the murder that sent him to death row was that the police threatened to kill him if he did…

Death penalty developments in Tennessee, South Carolina, and Wisconsin have recently been featured in the news: The U.S. Supreme Court declined to consider the case of Abdur’Rahman v. Bredesen in which the Tennessee Supreme Court held that the state’s lethal injection procedure is constitutional under the Eighth Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court’s action is no reflection of their opinion on the matter of lethal injection. The Justices are currently reviewing a separate case that asks whether…

An editorial in the Asbury Park Press, a newspaper that formerly supported capital punishment, called on New Jersey policymakers to abandon the state’s costly death penalty and replace it with the ​“sure and swift” sentence of life without parole. Stating that New Jersey has wasted millions of dollars on the death penalty, but has not carried out an execution since it was reinstated in1982, the editorial noted: Can it really be 22 years since Robert O. Marshall cowardly hired hit men to shoot…

A recent editorial in Nature, the international weekly journal of science, called on scientists and doctors to refuse to participate in executions: ​“Don’t advise, don’t prescribe, don’t inject. Let the death penalty die a natural death.” Noting that courts are now considering whether the death penalty by lethal injection should be outlawed as inhumane, the editorial points out that the procedure was largely developed without the input of physicians, nurses, or scientists. It also notes that…

After spending more than a decade in jail for a crime he did not commit, Douglas Arthur Warney has been exonerated and will be freed from prison in New York based on DNA evidence. Police maintained that Warney had confessed to the crime. Warney is a poorly educated man with a history of delusions and suffering from an advanced case of AIDS. He originally faced the death penalty for the 1996 stabbing murder in Rochester, but was ultimately convicted of second-degree homicide and sentenced to 25…

According to a new report on the work performed by the Houston Crime Lab issued by independent investigator Michael Bromwich, at least one capital case is among the 43 DNA cases and 50 serology cases processed at the lab since 1980 that have now been identified as having ​“major issues.” This classification is defined as ​“problems that raise significant doubt as to the reliabilitiy of the work performed, the validity of the analytical results, or the correctness of the analysts’ conclusions.”

A recent op-ed by Theodore Shaw, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, urged a full and fair investigation into the case of Ruben Cantu, a Texas man who may have been innocent of the murder for which he was executed in 1993. Shaw noted that Cantu’s case was ​“fraught with systemic errors,” including the fact that his conviction was based on a single eyewitness identification by a man who has said he was pressured by police. Shaw praised the work of the…