Publications & Testimony

In a dissenting opinion filed in the capital case of Moore v. Parker, Judge Boyce Martin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit wrote that ​“the death penalty in this country is arbitrary, biased, and so fundamentally flawed at its very core that it is beyond repair.” Among his many criticisms of the way capital punishment is applied in the U.S., Martin specifically noted his concerns about the issues of innocence, inadequate defense counsel, and the overall arbitrariness of the…

A new study by a team of researchers at the New York Times looks at the expanding use of life sentences in the American criminal justice system. The study, headed by Times reporter Adam Liptak, found that about 132,000 of the nation’s prisoners, or almost 10%, are serving life sentences. Of those, 28% have life sentences with no chance of parole. This is a marked increase from a 1993 Times study that found 20% of all lifers had no chance of parole. Liptak also reported that about 9,700 people…

(Pursuant to the Supreme Court’s 2005 ruling in Roper v. Simmons, the death penalty is prohibited in all states for those under the age of 18 when the offense for which they were charged was committed.) AGE STATES SIXTEEN AND ABOVE (1 state) North Carolina* SEVENTEEN AND ABOVE (8 states) Georgia, Louisiana,** Michigan, Missouri, New York,** South Carolina,** Texas, Wisconsin EIGHTEEN AND ABOVE (41 states plus the District of Columbia) Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado…

Karla, a new play by singer and songwriter Steve Earle will open at the 45 Bleecker St. Theatre on October 20 in New York City. The play tells the life story of Karla Faye Tucker, the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War. She was executed by lethal injection in 1998 while George W. Bush was governor, despite her obvious rehabilitation and opposition from a broad spectrum of national and international leaders. The play is being presented by The Culture Project, which also presented…

The entire current edition of Congressional Quarterly’s CQ Researcher is devoted to a comprehensive look at the death penalty in the U.S. This special CQ report, authored by Kenneth Jost and entitled ​“Death Penalty Controversies,” explores the history of the U.S. death penalty and changing public opinion about its use. It also looks at the current status of state moratorium developments, the continuing decline in U.S. executions, state responses to the Supreme Court’s ban on executing the…

RACE AND THE DEATH PENALTY IN CALIFORNIA A recent study to be published in the Santa Clara Law Review found that the race of the victim in the underlying murder greatly affected whether a defendant would be sentenced to death. Generally, there are more Hispanic and African American victims of murder in California: —California Murder Victims 1990 – 1999 — Office of Vital Statistics; based on murders where race of victim was known; Whites, African American, and Other are non-Hispanic members of…

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed yesterday to review the case of a death row inmate from South Carolina who was denied the opportunity at trial to present evidence of the possible guilt of another person. In Holmes v. South Carolina, No. 04 – 1327, the Court will consider whether the state’s rules regarding such evidence deprived Holmes of his due process rights to present a complete defense. In 2004, the South Carolina Supreme Court had ruled that the state’s evidence against Holmes was so strong…

The Judicial Conference of the United States, the policy making body of the nation’s federal judges, wrote a strong letter to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee opposing parts of the Streamlined Procedures Act (S.1088) that would curtail death penalty appeals. The bill is scheduled to be marked up by the Committee on Thursday, September 29. The judges said the bill could ​“create unreasonable obstacles to resolution” of death penalty cases, and that it could ​“undermine the traditional…

Craig Haney, professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has just published a new book, Death By Design: Capital Punishment as a Social Psychological System (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2005). Haney explores a number of areas that skew death penalty sentencing in America: Jury selection — By systematically screening out opponents of capital punishment, the process produces unrepresentative juries and juries that include a high concentration of people who…

Recent research has revealed a close correlation between the U.S. states that historically carried out the most lynchings and the states that today have the highest homicide rates and most death sentences. In a study led by sociologist Steven Messner of the State University of New York at Albany, county data from 10 southern states where historically reliable information on vigilante lynchings between 1882 and 1930 is available were examined (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky…