Publications & Testimony

The U.S. Supreme Court, with Justice Samuel Alito writing his first opinion, unanimously ruled on May 1 that South Carolina had deprived Bobbie Lee Holmes of a fair trial when it prevented him from putting on evidence contradictory to the state’s case and that pointed to another possible suspect. South Carolina’s rule was that if the state had put on strong forensic evidence of the defendant’s guilt, the defendant could be prohibited from raising an alternative theory of a third party’s guilt.

“A Meal to Die For” is a short story by Professor Robert Johnson examining capital punishment through the eyes of a man approaching his execution. The story is part of The Crying Wall and Other Prison Stories, a larger collection of short stories by a variety of authors. In “A Meal to Die For,” Johnson weaves the death row prisoner’s last meal with the gradual process of lethal injection, resulting in a painful death. Robert Johnson is a Professor of Justice, Law and Society at American…

“Looking Deathworthy: Perceived Stereotypicality of Black Defendants Predicts Capital-Sentencing Outcomes” contains new research on race conducted by professors from Stanford, UCLA, Yale and Cornell, led by Prof. Jennifer Eberhardt. The article, to be published in the May 2006 edition of Psychological Science, examines whether the likelihood of being sentenced to death is influenced by the degree to which a black defendant is perceived to have a stereotypically black appearance. Using data from…

Two of the leading cases challenging the lethal injection process as a civil rights violation were significantly delayed to allow the parties more time to gather information. In California, the federal District Court overseeing the case of Michael Morales postponed the scheduled May 2 hearing until September 19, 2006. In Missouri, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit granted a 60-day extension for discovery and a hearing in the case of Michael Taylor. Both inmates had come within…

On April 11, Texas Judge Wayne Salvant ruled that death row inmate Steven Kenneth Staley could be physically forced to take anti-psychotic medication that could render him competent enough to be executed. The decision came nearly two months after the judge stopped Staley’s scheduled execution following testimony from two doctors who stated that Staley suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and is too mentally ill to be executed. The law requires that Staley be mentally competent before he is…

Daryl Mack, who repeatedly noted that he would rather be executed than spend the next 20 years of his life on death row pursuing legal appeals, was executed Wednesday for a 1988 murder in Reno. Mack was convicted in 2002. He was the 12^th person executed in Nevada since capital punishment was reinstated in 1977, and the 11^th to waive remaining appeals at the time of execution. He was the first black man to be executed in the Nevada since executions resumed in the state. On the same day that…

The percentage of federal death penalty cases resulting in death sentences has declined from the 1990s to the present. Since 1991, juries chose a death sentence in 51 cases compared with 93 cases that ended with a sentence of life in prison, according to Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel, a rate of 35% for death sentences. Since 2000, juries have returned 29 death sentences and 69 life sentences, a rate of 30%. (Washington Post, April 25, 2006).