Publications & Testimony

The Republican (Springfield, MA) October 11, 2004 Editorial One day, we hope, the United States Supreme Court will rule that the death penalty is unconstitutional. In the meantime, the nation’s highest court can take a step toward that end by ruling it unconstitutional to execute a juvenile. On Oct. 13, the court will hear arguments in Roper vs. Simmons, a challenge to the constitutionality of the death penalty for persons who committed crimes when they were 16 or 17 years old. The United…

On October 9, the U.S. Senate passed by voice vote a bill called the “Justice for All Act of 2004” that contains important elements of the Innocence Protection Act, originally introduced in 2000. A similar bill recently overwhelmingly passed the House of Representatives (HR 5107), and it is expected that the final legislation will now be signed into law. The bill provides for expanded access to DNA testing for prison inmates and assistance to states for both defense and prosecution in…

A deeply divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled 8 – 7 that the execution of Tennessee death row inmate Paul Gregory House may move forward despite the fact that nearly half of the judges believe he is not guilty and should be freed immediately. “We are faced with a real-life murder mystery, an authentic ‘who-done-it’ where the wrong man may be executed,” wrote dissenting judge Ronald Lee Gilman. A N.Y. Times article noted that although courts are often closely divided on legal…

A recently published study by Northeastern criminal justice professors William J. Bowers and Michael E. Antonio, in conjunction with University of Delaware professors Valerie P. Hans and Benjamin D. Fleury-Steiner, finds jurors very reluctant to give the death penalty to juvenile defendants because of their immaturity and dysfunctional family backgrounds. “ In interviewing almost 1,200 jurors, we’ve found that jurors across the nation would nearly always sentence a juvenile to life,” said…

The Virginian-Pilot October 7, 2004 Editorial True to Virginia’s roots, the state political establishment will cast its lot with the executioners when the U. S. Supreme Court takes up the juvenile death penalty on Oct. 13. Attorney General Jerry Kilgore has joined his counterparts in Alabama, Delaware, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah in signing a legal brief supporting retention of the ultimate penalty for youths whose crimes were committed at ages 16 or 17. Unfortunately, that’s par for the…

In a forthcoming article, Columbia University researchers found that, since 1994, when death sentences for juvenile offenders peaked, these sentences have declined significantly. In particular, the decline in juvenile death sentences since 1999 is statistically significant after controlling for the murder rate, the juvenile homicide arrest rate, and the rate of adult death sentences. This downward trend in juvenile death sentences is indicative of an evolving standard in state trial courts…

Ernest Willis is likely to be the eighth person exonerated and freed from Texas’s death row. He would be the 117^th person freed nationwide since 1973. Willis was sentenced to death 17 years ago for allegedly setting a house fire that killed two people. Now the state’s own fire expert, Gerald Hurst, has concluded: “There is not a single item of physical evience in this case which supports a finding of arson.” He labeled some of the “scientific” evidence at Willis’s first trial as “absurd.” The…

The Journal Sentinel (Milwaukee, WI) October 5, 2004 Editorial In its term that began this week, the nation’s top court gets chances to make America fairer by outlawing the death penalty for crimes committed by 16- and 17-year-olds, amending federal sentencing practices that yield overly long prison stays, and barring the inspection of stopped cars by drug-sniffing dogs without reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. Meanwhile, court watchers would not be surprised if this term made big news in…

David Kevin Hocker, a mentally ill man who waived all his appeals, was executed in Alabama last night (Sept. 30). He was the first person to be executed in that state without a review by the state’s Supreme Court. Hocker had murdered his employer in 1998. No one from the victim’s family attended the execution. Hocker’s mother did attend her son’s execution, and was so distraught she had to leave the witness room. She said that her son had been suicidal for many years. Hocker’s trial lasted one…