Publications & Testimony

Although Scott Panetti has a long history of mental illness and insists that Texas is working in cooperation with Satan to execute him as a way to keep him from preaching the gospel, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has declared him sane enough to be executed. The panel acknowledged that Panetti is mentally ill and might lack a rational understanding of his fate, but maintained that Panetti is able to understand the basis for his execution. The full court…

A May 2006 Gallup Poll examining American opinion about the death penalty found that when given a choice between the sentencing options of life without parole and the death penalty, only 47% of respondents chose capital punishment, the lowest percentage in two decades. Forty-eight percent favored life without parole for those convicted of murder. The poll also revealed that overall support for the death penalty remains low at 65%, down significantly from 1994 when 80% supported capital…

Reversing its long-standing support for capital punishment, the Spokane Spokesman-Review recently published an editorial calling for an end to capital punishment in the United States. The paper noted that the decision to change its stance on the death penalty came after careful consideration of growing evidence that the newspaper’s “expectations of fairness and justice” are not being met and that the death penalty’s “drawbacks now outweigh its merits.” The editorial in full: It took Jermaine…

The latest edition of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s “Death Row USA” shows that the number of people on the death row in the United States is continuing to decline, falling to 3,370 as of April 1, 2006. The size of death row increased every year between 1976 and 2000, but since then it has been in a slow decline. According to the report, the states with the largest decrease in death row population since January 1, 2006 are Texas (down by 5) and South Carolina (down by 3). California continues…

There are currently 120 foreign nationals from 32 countries on death rows across the U.S. These are individuals who have been condemned to death in this country but are not citizens of the U.S. In many cases, these defendants were not informed of their rights under Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. This treaty was signed and ratified by the U.S., but many defendants from countries that are also parties to the Vienna Convention were not told of their right to contact the…

Prosecutors in New Jersey announced that they were dropping all charges against Larry Peterson who had been convicted of murder in 1989, saying they could no longer meet their burden of proof in his case. Peterson’s conviction was overturned last year after DNA tests failed to match him with evidence from the scene of the crime. The state had initially sought the death penalty against Peterson, who is now 55 after spending 18 years in prison. The Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School in New…

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…