Publications & Testimony

St. Petersburg…

Just weeks after leg­is­la­tors in Wyoming and South Dakota passed leg­is­la­tion to ban the exe­cu­tion of juve­nile offend­ers, law­mak­ers in Florida are on a sim­i­lar course that may send a bill that elim­i­nates the death penal­ty for those under the age of 18 to Governor Jeb Bush for sig­na­ture into law. Members of the Florida Senate passed the juve­nile death penal­ty ban by a vote of 26 – 12, and the House is expect­ed to take up the mea­sure lat­er this week. Florida…

More than two decades after Max Soffar was sen­tenced to die for a Houston-area triple mur­der, an appel­late court has ruled that his court-appoint­ed attor­ney inad­e­quate­ly rep­re­sent­ed him dur­ing his 1980 tri­al and that he deserves to be retried with­in 120 days or freed from Texas’s death row. Although no evi­dence link­ing Soffar to the crime was ever found and his accounts of the mur­ders, con­tained in what are believed to be false con­fes­sions, var­ied vast­ly from several…

National…

St. Petersburg…

“The Problem of False Confessions in a Post-DNA World,” a recent study pub­lished in the North Carolina Law Review, found that juve­nile offend­ers were involved in 33% of the cas­es where the defen­dant con­fessed to a crime that he or she did not com­mit. Ninety-two per­cent of the cas­es involved false con­fes­sions from indi­vid­u­als under the age of 40, and more than half were under the age of 25.

Decatur…

By a vote of 29 – 19, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights passed a res­o­lu­tion call­ing on all nations to declare a mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions. The res­o­lu­tion cit­ed con­cerns about the fair­ness and accu­ra­cy of the death penal­ty. In order to address these prob­lems, the res­o­lu­tion calls on nations that no longer use the death penal­ty to remove it from their laws, and for coun­tries that con­tin­ue to car­ry out exe­cu­tions to lim­it the num­ber of crimes that…

Lakeland…

Concorde…