Publications & Testimony

In an historic move to ensure that Texas fairly applies the death penalty and that defendants are afforded proper legal protections to prove their innocence, Texas Governor Rick Perry appointed a nine-member special council with sweeping powers to review an array of legal issues ranging from police investigations to court appeals. The appointment of the panel is the first acton of its kind by a Texas governor in decades. “I have great confidence in our justice system, but no system is perfect…

By a vote of 25 – 15, members of the Connecticut Judiciary Committee voted for legislation to repeal the state’s death penalty and replace it with life in prison without the possibility of parole, an action that clears the way for the House to debate the measure. Supporters of the bill say that the state’s death penalty is an unenforceable statute, a source of agony for families of murder victims, and a fiscal burden the state can no longer afford to bear. “We should not be debating spending $3…

The Bush administration has pulled out of the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, an international agreement that has been in place for more than 30 years and that the United States initially supported to protect its citizens abroad. In recent years, the provision has been successfully invoked by foreign nations whose citizens were sentenced to death by U.S. states without receiving access to diplomats from their home countries, events which served as the basis for…

By a margin of 46 – 42 percent, New Yorkers do not want to see the death penalty reinstated, according to a recent Siena Research Institute poll of state voters. The poll also found that a clear majority (56 percent) support the sentencing option of life without parole over capital punishment. By a margin of 46 – 42 percent, New Yorkers do not want to see the death penalty reinstated, according to a recent Siena Research Institute poll of state voters. The poll also found that a clear majority…

On February 28, 2005, Ohio Common Pleas Judge Richard Niehaus dismissed all charges against Derrick Jamison for the death of a Cincinnati bartender after prosecutors elected not to retry him in the case. (Associated Press, March 3, 2005). The prosecution had withheld critical eyewitness statements and other evidence from the defense resulting in the overturning of Jamison’s conviction in 2002. Jamison was convicted and sentenced to death in 1985 based in part on the testimony of Charles Howell…

SUPREME COURT BANS EXECUTION OF JUVENILE OFFENDERS On March 1, 2005, the Court held that the Eighth Amendment forbids imposition of the death penalty on offenders who were under the age of 18 at the time of their crimes. Below are exceprts from the opinion: “[T]he objective indicia of consensus in this case — the rejection of the juvenile death penalty in the majority of States; the infrequency of its use even where it remains on the books; and the consistency in the trend toward abolition of…

A recent article in the Wayne Law Review by Prof. Phillys L. Crocker of the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law examines the Supreme Court’s struggle with the issue of death row inmates waiving their appeals. Crocker uses Rees v. Peyton, a capital case that remained on the Court’s docket from 1965 – 1995, to explore the issue. In that case, Virginia death row inmate Melvin Rees sought to withdraw his petition for a writ of certiorari so that he could be executed. In 1967, the Supreme Court stayed…

According to state and federal records obtained by The Los Angeles Times, maintaining the California death penalty system costs taxpayers more than $114 million a year beyond the cost of simply keeping the convicts locked up for life. This figure does not count the millions more spent on court costs to prosecute capital cases. The Times concluded that Californians and federal taxpayers have paid more than a quarter of a billion dollars for each of the state’s 11 executions, and that it costs…

The White House has ordered state courts to consider the complaints of 51 Mexican foreign nationals on death row in the United States. This Executive Order is an abrupt international policy shift for the Bush administration and comes just weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to consider what effect U.S. courts should give to a ruling in favor of the 51 foreign nationals by the United Nations’ highest tribunal, the International Court of Justice at the Hague. The World Court found…

Dr. Jeffrey Fagan, a professor at Columbia University Law School and a leading national expert on deterrence, testifed that recent studies claiming to show a deterrent effect to capital punishment are fraught with technical and conceptual errors. Fagan noted that a string of recent studies purporting to show that the death penalty can prevent murders use inappropriate methods of statistical analysis, fail to consider all the relevant factors that drive murder rates, and do not consider…