Publications & Testimony

SUPREME COURT BANS EXECUTION OF JUVENILE OFFENDERS On March 1, 2005, the Court held that the Eighth Amendment for­bids impo­si­tion of the death penal­ty on offend­ers who were under the age of 18 at the time of their crimes. Below are exceprts from the opin­ion: “[T]he objec­tive indi­cia of con­sen­sus in this case — the rejec­tion of the juve­nile death penal­ty in the major­i­ty of States; the infre­quen­cy of its use even where it remains on the books; and the con­sis­ten­cy in the trend toward abolition of…

A recent arti­cle in the Wayne Law Review by Prof. Phillys L. Crocker of the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law exam­ines the Supreme Court’s strug­gle with the issue of death row inmates waiv­ing their appeals. Crocker uses Rees v. Peyton, a cap­i­tal case that remained on the Court’s dock­et from 1965 – 1995, to explore the issue. In that case, Virginia death row inmate Melvin Rees sought to with­draw his peti­tion for a writ of cer­tio­rari so that he could be exe­cut­ed. In 1967, the Supreme Court stayed…

According to state and fed­er­al records obtained by The Los Angeles Times, main­tain­ing the California death penal­ty sys­tem costs tax­pay­ers more than $114 mil­lion a year beyond the cost of sim­ply keep­ing the con­victs locked up for life. This fig­ure does not count the mil­lions more spent on court costs to pros­e­cute cap­i­tal cas­es. The Times con­clud­ed that Californians and fed­er­al tax­pay­ers have paid more than a quar­ter of a bil­lion dol­lars for each of the state’s 11 exe­cu­tions, and that it costs…

The White House has ordered state courts to con­sid­er the com­plaints of 51 Mexican for­eign nation­als on death row in the United States. This Executive Order is an abrupt inter­na­tion­al pol­i­cy shift for the Bush admin­is­tra­tion and comes just weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court is sched­uled to con­sid­er what effect U.S. courts should give to a rul­ing in favor of the 51 for­eign nation­als by the United Nations’ high­est tri­bunal, the International Court of Justice at the Hague. The World Court found…

Dr. Jeffrey Fagan, a pro­fes­sor at Columbia University Law School and a lead­ing nation­al expert on deter­rence, tes­tifed that recent stud­ies claim­ing to show a deter­rent effect to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment are fraught with tech­ni­cal and con­cep­tu­al errors. Fagan not­ed that a string of recent stud­ies pur­port­ing to show that the death penal­ty can pre­vent mur­ders use inap­pro­pri­ate meth­ods of sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis, fail to con­sid­er all the rel­e­vant fac­tors that dri­ve mur­der rates, and do not consider…

In his new book, Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), the Times-Picayune city edi­tor Jed Horne exam­ines the exon­er­a­tion of Louisiana death row inmate Curtis Kyles and how his case has impact­ed the New Orleans crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. The book inves­ti­gates the mur­der of Delores Dye, a 60-year-old house­wife who was gunned down in full view of six eye­wit­ness­es. Kyles was arrest­ed and tried twice for the crime. After an initial…

Members of New Mexico’s House of Representatives have passed a bill to abol­ish the death penal­ty, mark­ing the first time that either cham­ber of the state’s leg­is­la­ture has passed such a mea­sure. Representative Gail Beam, who has spon­sored the abo­li­tion bill every two years since she was elect­ed in 1996, not­ed that the vote was ​“a his­toric oppor­tu­ni­ty for New Mexico to take a step that’s both thought­ful and prac­ti­cal and to join oth­er indus­tri­al­ized democ­ra­cies in replac­ing the death penalty…

These case descrip­tions are tak­en from Professor Victor Streib’s 2005 arti­cle, ​“The Juvenile Death Penalty Today: Death Sentences and Executions for Juvenile Crimes, January 1, 1973 — February 28,…

Former FBI Chief and fed­er­al judge William Sessions recent­ly joined two oth­er for­mer fed­er­al judges and a pros­e­cu­tor urg­ing the U.S. Supreme Court to con­sid­er an appeal from Ohio death row inmate John Spirko. In their brief, Sessions and his col­leagues assert that the pros­e­cu­tion argued a the­o­ry at Spirko’s tri­al that it had to know was at least part­ly sus­pect. ​“When the ulti­mate penal­ty is at issue, jus­tice demands scrupu­lous con­duct from pros­e­cu­tors. It is not enough for a prosecutor to…

The Chair of the Judiciary Committee of the New York Assembly recent­ly voiced her strong con­cerns about the state’s death penal­ty. Although she sup­port­ed cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment ear­li­er, Assemblywoman Helene E. Weinstein spoke about the evo­lu­tion in her think­ing and her par­tic­u­lar con­cerns about the risk of exe­cut­ing the inno­cent: ​“It was an evo­lu­tion­ary process. But clear­ly the advent of DNA evi­dence and the dra­mat­ic num­ber of indi­vid­u­als who have been exon­er­at­ed and freed from death row in…