Publications & Testimony

Georgia has enact­ed leg­is­la­tion to under­take the defense of indi­gent per­sons charged with cap­i­tal felonies for which the death penal­ty is being sought in any court in the state. The Office of the Multi-County Public Defender will become the Georgia Capital Defender Office in January 2005. The office is now seek­ing to fill key staff posi­tions. ​“See Job Description” (Jan. 15, 2004); see also DPIC’s report ​“With Justice for Few: The Growing Crisis in Death Penalty…

The Chinese gov­ern­ment is plan­ning to imple­ment judi­cial reforms that could sharply reduce its use of the death penal­ty. China will restrict the use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment by requir­ing its high­est court, the Supreme People’s Court, to review all death penal­ty cas­es before exe­cu­tions are car­ried out. Currently, the high court reviews only a minor­i­ty of such cas­es, allow­ing the provin­cial courts that hand down death sen­tences to review their own judg­ments. ​“Criticism of the legal system in…

After spend­ing more than half of his life on Pennsylvania’s death row for a crime he did not com­mit, Nicholas Yarris was released from prison on Friday, January 16. Yarris had been sen­tenced to death row in 1983 for the mur­der of Linda Craig and was cleared of all charges in December 2003 (see DPIC’s press release) after DNA evi­dence exclud­ed him from the crime. He remained jailed for weeks after he was exon­er­at­ed while author­i­ties recal­cu­lat­ed sen­tences he received in Florida for crimes he…

The Pacific island of Samoa has begun for­mal mea­sures to abol­ish the death penal­ty. Samoa has not con­duct­ed an exe­cu­tion in more than 50 years, and death sen­tences that are still deliv­ered by judges are always com­mut­ed to life impris­on­ment. As he intro­duced the statute to abol­ish the death penal­ty, Prime Minister Sailele Malielegaoi told par­lia­ment that the death penal­ty should not be on the law books if it is not going to be car­ried out. (ONE News and AAP, January 16, 2004) See International…

DPIC has pre­pared a new chart show­ing the num­ber of death sen­tences in each state by year since 1977. As we have indi­cat­ed else­where, the over­all num­ber of death sen­tences in the U.S. has declined marked­ly in recent years. For exam­ple, the 159 death sen­tences in 2002 were only HALF of the 320 sen­tences in 1996. Regionally, sen­tences in the West have dropped the most, from 66 in 1996 to 21 in 2002. DPIC’s chart is based on Bureau of Justice Statistics’ reports. For more infor­ma­tion on the…

The Associated Press pro­vid­ed a descrip­tion of the strug­gle to exe­cute Ohio death row inmate Lewis Williams on January 14,…

A month after New Jersey’s leg­is­la­ture passed by a wide mar­gin a bipar­ti­san bill call­ing for the cre­ation of a study com­mis­sion to exam­ine the cost, fair­ness and effects of cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tions in the state, Governor James McGreevey has vetoed the mea­sure. The bill passed the leg­is­la­ture in December 2003 with the sup­port of key state law­mak­ers, includ­ing death penal­ty pro­po­nents. In recent years, pub­lic sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in gen­er­al has sharply declined in New Jersey, and the…

Attorneys from the New York Capital Defender Office have fol­lowed the lead of var­i­ous death penal­ty experts and peti­tioned the New York Court of Appeals to require a high­er stan­dard of proof of guilt before a death sen­tence may be sought. The cur­rent stan­dard of ​“beyond a rea­son­able doubt” of guilt applies in both cap­i­tal and non-cap­i­tal cas­es. Because of the evi­dence of mis­takes in death penal­ty cas­es, the attor­neys called for proof ​“beyond any doubt” in such cas­es. Frank Keating, a senior…

Kamala Harris, the new­ly-elect­ed San Francisco District Attorney, recent­ly spoke about her approach to keep­ing the community…

A recent Harris Poll found that only 41% of Americans believe that the death penal­ty deters crime, mark­ing the small­est num­ber of such respon­dents in 27 years of this poll. Only 37% of those polled would con­tin­ue to sup­port cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment if they believed ​“that quite a sub­stan­tial num­ber of inno­cent peo­ple are con­vict­ed of mur­der.” Overall, 69% per­cent of those polled said that they sup­port cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. The poll was con­duct­ed in December 2003. (PR Newswire, January 7, 2004) See…