Publications & Testimony

In ​“Waiting to Die: Life on Death Row,” Richard M. Rossi pro­vides a first-hand account of his dai­ly life on Arizona’s death row. Rossi was sen­tenced to death in 1983 and has tak­en respon­si­bil­i­ty for the mur­der he com­mit­ted. He was orig­i­nal­ly offered a plea bar­gain with a life sen­tence, but he decid­ed to go to tri­al. He has been on death row for 20 years. In his book, Rossi details how pris­on­ers sur­vive on death row, the con­di­tions under which they live, and the psy­cho­log­i­cal toll that…

The Republican (Springfield,…

On October 9, the U.S. Senate passed by voice vote a bill called the ​“Justice for All Act of 2004” that con­tains impor­tant ele­ments of the Innocence Protection Act, orig­i­nal­ly intro­duced in 2000. A sim­i­lar bill recent­ly over­whelm­ing­ly passed the House of Representatives (HR 5107), and it is expect­ed that the final leg­is­la­tion will now be signed into law. The bill pro­vides for expand­ed access to DNA test­ing for prison inmates and assis­tance to states for both defense and prosecution in…

A deeply divid­ed U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled 8 – 7 that the exe­cu­tion of Tennessee death row inmate Paul Gregory House may move for­ward despite the fact that near­ly half of the judges believe he is not guilty and should be freed imme­di­ate­ly. ​“We are faced with a real-life mur­der mys­tery, an authen­tic ​‘who-done-it’ where the wrong man may be exe­cut­ed,” wrote dis­sent­ing judge Ronald Lee Gilman. A N.Y. Times arti­cle not­ed that although courts are often close­ly divided on…

A recent­ly pub­lished study by Northeastern crim­i­nal jus­tice pro­fes­sors William J. Bowers and Michael E. Antonio, in con­junc­tion with University of Delaware pro­fes­sors Valerie P. Hans and Benjamin D. Fleury-Steiner, finds jurors very reluc­tant to give the death penal­ty to juve­nile defen­dants because of their imma­tu­ri­ty and dys­func­tion­al fam­i­ly back­grounds. “ In inter­view­ing almost 1,200 jurors, we’ve found that jurors across the nation would near­ly always sen­tence a juve­nile to life,” said…

The…

In a forth­com­ing arti­cle, Columbia University researchers found that, since 1994, when death sen­tences for juve­nile offend­ers peaked, these sen­tences have declined sig­nif­i­cant­ly. In par­tic­u­lar, the decline in juve­nile death sen­tences since 1999 is sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant after con­trol­ling for the mur­der rate, the juve­nile homi­cide arrest rate, and the rate of adult death sen­tences. This down­ward trend in juve­nile death sen­tences is indica­tive of an evolv­ing stan­dard in state trial…

Ernest Willis is like­ly to be the eighth per­son exon­er­at­ed and freed from Texas’s death row. He would be the 117^th per­son freed nation­wide since 1973. Willis was sen­tenced to death 17 years ago for alleged­ly set­ting a house fire that killed two peo­ple. Now the state’s own fire expert, Gerald Hurst, has con­clud­ed: ​“There is not a sin­gle item of phys­i­cal evience in this case which sup­ports a find­ing of arson.” He labeled some of the ​“sci­en­tif­ic” evi­dence at Willis’s first trial as…

The Journal Sentinel (Milwaukee,…