Publications & Testimony

The Death Penalty Information Center’s 2004 Year End Report not­ing the declines in death sen­tences, exe­cu­tions, and the num­ber of peo­ple on death row was cov­ered by about 200 news out­lets through­out the U.S. and over­seas. Some news­pa­pers took the occa­sion to edi­to­ri­al­ize about the state of the death penal­ty: Detroit Free Press The death penal­ty, thank­ful­ly, is mak­ing its own slow demise in the United States. Given the legal, moral and eco­nom­ic prob­lems with the death penal­ty, all 38…

Capital Consequences: Families of the Condemned Tell Their Stories is a new book by Rachel King of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project. The book focus­es on the impact that the death penal­ty has on the fam­i­lies of those who have been con­demned to die. King, who also wrote ​“Don’t Kill in Our Names: Families of Murder Victims Speak Out Against the Death Penalty,” describes these indi­vid­u­als as the unseen vic­tims of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and high­lights the expe­ri­ence of having loved…

Published on Tuesday, December 28, 2004 by the Miami Herald by Bianca…

A&E tele­vi­sion host and well-known inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist Bill Kurtis chron­i­cles his jour­ney from death penal­ty sup­port­er to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment oppo­nent in his new­ly released book, The Death Penalty on Trial: Crisis in American Justice. In an inter­view with the Kansas City Star, Kurtis stat­ed, ​“Look, I was for the death penal­ty, but look­ing at these cas­es and the rapid­ly increas­ing num­ber of exon­er­a­tions, there are just too many possibilities for…

Premeditated: Meditations on Capital Punishment, Recent Works by Malaquias Montoya is a new art exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logue fea­tur­ing recent­ly cre­at­ed silkscreen images, paint­ings, and relat­ed research deal­ing with the death penal­ty and pris­ons. The works fea­tured in this book are part of a col­lec­tion of art that is cur­rent­ly tour­ing the United States. Montoya has lec­tured and taught at numer­ous uni­ver­si­ties and col­leges in the San Francisco Bay Area, includ­ing Stanford, UC Berkeley and UC Davis.

While applaud­ing a life-sen­tence plea bar­gain arranged by Palm Beach County’s State Attorney in an espe­cial­ly heinous mur­der, the Palm Beach Post said the state had ​“forfeit[ed] the moral stand­ing to exe­cute any­one else.” The State Attorney said that he agreed to let the defen­dant plead guilty to killing 5 peo­ple because the life-with­out-parole sent­nece will bring final­i­ty. The Post not­ed: ​“The state saves not only the cost of a tri­al; the vic­tims’ rel­a­tives — who supported…

In its annu­al eclec­tic col­lec­tion of ideas from the past year, The New York Times Magazine includ­ed the ​“Foolproof Death Penalty” propsed by Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. The Times attempts ​“to salute the absurd­ly wide range of human orig­i­nal­i­ty” and culls its entries not only from main­stream sources but also from the ​“tat­too cul­ture and fast food man­age­ment, hor­ti­cul­ture and shoe design.” In response to Romney’s notion of ​“error-free cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment,” Berkeley law professor…

According to a recent poll con­duct­ed by the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, only 62% of respon­dents sup­port cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment for per­sons con­vict­ed of mur­der, and Americans pre­fer the sen­tenc­ing option of life with­out parole when giv­en the choice. Overall sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment has fall­en since Quinnipiac’s poll in June 2004, when sup­port reg­is­tered 65%. Similar shifts in pub­lic opin­ion found grow­ing sup­port for life-with­out-parole sen­tences. In the December poll when…

California already has the largest death row in the coun­try and is now plan­ning to build a new $220 mil­lion facil­i­ty designed to house more than 1,400 death row inmates. State Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald M. George said that the large death row reflects the con­se­quences of a care­ful appeals process that is designed to ensure due process for those fac­ing exe­cu­tion. ​“The virtues of the sys­tem also rep­re­sent its vices because it does end up caus­ing a lot of delay,” stat­ed the Chief…

The Kansas Supreme Court has ruled that the state’s 1994 death penal­ty law is uncon­sti­tu­tion­al because it con­tains a pro­vi­sion giv­ing the state an advan­tage when jurors find the aggra­vat­ing and mit­i­gat­ing fac­tors pre­sent­ed at sen­tenc­ing to be equal. In that cir­cum­stance, the cur­rent law states that the defen­dant must be sen­tenced to death. The Court ruled that such a pro­vi­sion does not allow the jury to express a rea­soned moral response to the evi­dence, and the process does not comport…