Publications & Testimony

In the two weeks since India’s first hang­ing in 13 years, two chil­dren have died and a third young boy was near­ly killed as a result of imi­tat­ing the high­ly pub­li­cized exe­cu­tion. A 14-year-old boy died after he tied one end of a rope around his neck and swung the oth­er end on a ceil­ing fan in his home to re-enact the exe­cu­tion. The boy’s father said that his son was very curi­ous about the nation’s first exe­cu­tion and had close­ly fol­lowed the days lead­ing up to it by watch­ing news accounts.

Death sen­tences have declined across the coun­try. The fol­low­ing four cas­es are recent illus­tra­tions of this…

The San Mateo County District Attorney’s Office reflect­ed on a num­ber of fac­tors in decid­ing to forego seek­ing a death sen­tence for Seti Christopher Scanlan, whose first tri­al end­ed in a mis­tri­al after he took the stand and begged jurors to sen­tence him to death. Prosecutors are now seek­ing a sen­tence of life in prison for Scanlan after con­clud­ing that ​“it was not rea­son­ably like­ly that we would get a jury that would deliv­er the death penal­ty.” The case has already cost tax­pay­ers more than…

In his Scientific American mag­a­zine arti­cle enti­tled, ​“The Case of the Unsolved Crime Decline,” crim­i­nol­o­gist Richard Rosenfeld exam­ines why U.S. crime rates dropped more than 40% in the 1990’s and what lessons cur­rent pol­i­cy-mak­ers can learn from this decline. Rosenfeld pro­vides an overview and eval­u­a­tion of pre­vi­ous research show­ing a link in the crime rate decline and fac­tors such as changes in demo­graph­ics, law-enforce­ment prac­tices, eco­nom­ic con­di­tions, incarceration rates,…

A broad spec­trum of the pub­lic is seek­ing clemen­cy for Texas death row inmate James Allridge, who is sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed on Thursday, August 26^th. Among those point­ing to Allridge’s reha­bil­i­ta­tion as the basis for mer­cy are four of the orig­i­nal jurors in his tri­al, two for­mer death row prison guards, a retired prison sys­tem admin­is­tra­tor, a Fort Worth city coun­cil­man, one of Allridge’s for­mer employ­ers, and mur­der vic­tims’ fam­i­ly mem­bers. The sup­port­ers state that since Aldridge…

The Summer 2004 DePaul Law Review con­tains pre­sen­ta­tions and arti­cles from the University’s two-day ​“Race to Execution” Symposium, an event that fea­tured remarks and pre­sen­ta­tions from some of the nation’s most renowned death penal­ty experts. This law review exam­ines the role that race has his­tor­i­cal­ly had and con­tin­ues to play in our nation’s death penal­ty debate. Among the arti­cles are pre­sen­ta­tions exam­in­ing the racial bias in cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing, how implic­it racial attitudes of…

Professor James R. Eisenberg’s new book, ​“Law, Psychology, and Death Penalty Litigation,” pro­vides a thor­ough intro­duc­tion to the role that foren­sic psy­chol­o­gy plays in cap­i­tal tri­als. Using a step-by-step approach that cov­ers the his­tor­i­cal and cur­rent legal con­text of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, Eisenberg describes the var­i­ous tasks that might con­front the foren­sic psy­chol­o­gist in a death penal­ty tri­al, includ­ing issues of com­pe­ten­cy to be exe­cut­ed, men­tal retar­da­tion, risk assess­ment, and…

A recent Albany Times Union edi­to­r­i­al called on state leg­is­la­tors to aban­don attempts to rein­state New York’s death penal­ty, which the state’s high­est court found uncon­sti­tu­tion­al because the statute’s jury instruc­tions could be coer­cive. The June 24^th New York Court of Appeals rul­ing in People v. Stephen LaValle spurred pro­posed leg­is­la­tion to rem­e­dy the statute. Some legal crit­ics who have exam­ined the new bill say that it may also be uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. The edi­to­r­i­al echoed this sentiment,…

In his new book ​“Jurors’ Stories of Death: How America’s Death Penalty Invests in Inequality,” author Benjamin Fleury-Steiner draws on real-life accounts of white and black jurors in cap­i­tal tri­als to dis­cuss the effect of race on the sen­tenc­ing process. Through his sur­vey of the jurors’ expe­ri­ences, he reveals that race is often a fac­tor in sen­tenc­ing and that the U.S. jus­tice sys­tem can fos­ter an ​“us ver­sus them” men­tal­i­ty among jurors serv­ing in cap­i­tal tri­als. Fleury-Steiner finds…