Publications & Testimony

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…

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…