Publications & Testimony

Benjamin Wittes, editorial page writer for The Washington Post, discusses the death penalty in light of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the October 2005 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. He states that the Court has “shifted gears on capital punishment” and predicts that this trend will continue through a series of decisions limiting the death penalty and addressing systemic flaws that continue to surface. Wittes writes: The Court has without question shifted gears on capital punishment.

Victims of Justice Revisited, a new book by Thomas Frisbie and Randy Garrett, details the innocence case of Rolando Cruz, an Illinois man who was wrongly convicted and sent to death row for the 1983 murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico. The book tells the story of Cruz and his two co-defendants, Alejandro Hernandez and Stephen Buckley, from the day of the crime to the groundbreaking trial of seven law enforcement officers accused of conspiring to deny Cruz a fair trial. Cruz’s case was one of…

Arthur Baird, who was to be executed on August 31 for murdering his parents in Indiana, received a commutation to a life sentence from Governor Mitch Daniels. (WishTV.com, Ch.8, Indianapolis, Aug. 29, 2005). Two members of the Indiana Supreme Court had written that Baird was “only marginally in touch with reality,” in a decision in which the majority had allowed the execution to go forward. A report to the court from Dr. Philip M. Coons, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at the Indiana…

Update: Frances Newton was executed in Texas on September 14, 2005. As Texas prepares to execute Frances Newton on September 14, her attorneys have raised questions in a clemency petition about her guilt based on new evidence, including conflicting accounts of whether investigators recovered a second gun at the crime scene. Newton, who would be the first black woman executed in the state since the Civil War, was sentenced to death for the 1987 killings of her husband and her two children. At…

Bill Wiseman, the former Oklahoma legislator who introduced lethal injection as a method of execution in the U.S. in order to make death row inmates’ deaths more humane, now regrets having pushed the concept into law. He notes that he introduced the measure in order to ease his shame for having voted to restore the death penalty in Oklahoma, stating, “I’m sorry for what I did. I hope someday to offset it by helping us realize that capital punishment is wrong and self-destructive.” While…

The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment, a new book edited by professor Austin Sarat of Amherst College and lecturer Christian Boulanger of the Free University in Berlin, examines the complicated dynamics of the death penalty in eleven nations to determine what role capital punishment plays in defining a country’s political and cultural identity. The editors note that a nation’s values and cultural history influence its relationship with capital punishment. The book includes examinations of…

A two-year Dallas Morning News investigation of jury selection in Dallas County has revealed that prosecutors exclude blacks from juries at more than twice the rate they reject whites, and that race is the most important personal trait affecting which jurors prosecutors reject. The paper’s review also found that when potential black and white jurors answered key questions about criminal justice issues the same way, blacks were rejected at a higher rate. The study examined 108 (non-death…

John P. Flannery, a former federal prosecutor and special counsel to the U.S. Senate and House Judiciary Committees, recently noted the broad problems in Virginia’s criminal justice system that could lead to convicting the innocent: We are convicting innocent people in Virginia because of false eyewitness testimony, false confessions, over-eager snitches, faulty forensics, bad defense lawyers but also, and this is the worst of all, because of prosecutorial misconduct and police misconduct. In…

The Appellate Division of New Jersey’s Superior Court in State v. Jimenez announced new procedures on August 17, 2005 for deciding claims of mental retardation by a defendant facing the death penalty: (a) the State must be put to the burden of proving the absence of mental retardation when a colorable issue is presented; (b) the State’s burden is to prove the absence of mental retardation beyond a reasonable doubt; (c) the jury must be the factfinder; and (d) a defendant may never be put to…

The Birmingham News sharply criticized Alabama’s system of representation in death penalty cases, saying that the public should be outraged. A lack of even minimal resources and pay has caused attorneys to withdraw from cases and to decline representation to indigent defendants. The paper wrote that this shortage of attorneys could result in more trial errors and longer appeals, putting an undue strain on victims’ families and the entire system of justice. The editorial stated: What would it…