Publications & Testimony

Jurors sen­tenced a man accused of rap­ing his step-daugh­ter in Louisiana to death based on a state law that was adopt­ed in 1995. The law states that the death penal­ty can be sought for aggra­vat­ed rape if the vic­tim is under the age of 12. The oth­er penal­ty avail­able to the jurors was a manda­to­ry sen­tence of life in prison with­out parole. (Associated Press, August 27, 2003) Since the death penal­ty was rein­stat­ed in 1976, no one in the United States has been exe­cut­ed except for a crime involving…

Opposition to the death penal­ty appears to grow the longer a coun­try has been with­out the pun­ish­ment. A Gallup International poll in 2000 found that 60% of west­ern Europeans opposed the death penal­ty, while 60% of east­ern Europeans (where abo­li­tion is still being debat­ed) sup­port the death penal­ty. In France, a TNS Sofres poll revealed that two decades after abo­li­tion of the death penal­ty, 49% of respon­dents opposed rein­tro­duc­tion of the pol­i­cy com­pared with 44% who want­ed to reinstate…

Following U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf’s opin­ion in the fed­er­al cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tion of Gary Lee Sampson express­ing his reser­va­tions about the risks of exe­cut­ing the inno­cent (click here for arti­cle), the Buffalo News raised sim­i­lar con­cerns in a recent…

In a 4 – 3 deci­sion to vacate the death sen­tence of juve­nile offend­er Christopher Simmons, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the juve­nile death penal­ty vio­lates the nation’s evolv­ing stan­dards of decen­cy and is there­fore uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. Noting that ​“a nation­al con­sen­sus has devel­oped against the exe­cu­tion of juve­nile offend­ers,” the Court’s opin­ion cit­ed evi­dence such as the grow­ing num­ber of states that have banned the prac­tice. The Court resen­tenced Simmons to life in prison without…

Cook County pros­e­cu­tors have dropped all charges against Michael Evans and Paul Terry, two men who had been con­vict­ed of rap­ing and mur­der­ing a 9‑year-old girl in 1976. Following DNA test­ing that cleared the Illinois men, the state freed Evans and Terry 26 years after they were sen­tenced to serve 200 to 400 years in prison for the crime. (In many states, the defen­dants could have been sen­tenced to death and exe­cut­ed before their exon­er­a­tion.) The men were 17 at the time of the crime, and no…

In ​“Capital Punishment in Colorado: 1859 – 1972,” University of Colorado pro­fes­sor and death penal­ty expert Michael Radelet reviews the his­to­ry of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in Colorado. In the arti­cle, Radelet reviews each of the state’s exe­cu­tions dur­ing that time peri­od and uses the data to show gen­er­al pat­terns regard­ing the aver­age time between con­vic­tion and exe­cu­tion, types of crimes and num­ber of vic­tims, and the logis­tics of car­ry­ing out the exe­cu­tions. 74 University of Colorado Law Review 885…

Pennsylvania death row inmate Nicholas James Yarris may become the next per­son to be freed from death row. In light of new DNA evi­dence that excludes Yarris as the per­son respon­si­ble for the 1981 rape and mur­der for which he was con­vict­ed, U.S. District Court Judge James Giles said that Yarris must be freed or grant­ed a new tri­al in Delaware County with­in two weeks. Giles gave the Delaware County dis­trict attor­ney’s office and defense attor­neys 10 days to con­firm that the new DNA tests are…

The most recent newslet­ter pro­duced by the End to Capital Punishment Movement USA (ECPM USA) high­lights devel­op­ments in the orga­ni­za­tion’s aim to strength­en the cross-Atlantic dia­logue on the death penal­ty. Among oth­er items, the newslet­ter con­tains arti­cles on state reports on the death penal­ty, the Council of Europe sem­i­nars on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment that were recent­ly held in Illinois and Washington, DC, and infor­ma­tion about the Second World Conference on the Death Penalty that is scheduled…

The fol­low­ing excerpts are from Judge Mark Wolf’s opin­ion allow­ing the fed­er­al cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tion of Gary Lee Sampson to pro­ceed. In his deci­sion, Judge Wolf of the Federal District Court in Boston expressed reser­va­tions about the risks of exe­cut­ing the inno­cent and appeared to crit­i­cize the Justice Department’s zeal­ous approach to seek­ing cap­i­tal con­vic­tions. The head­ings for these excerpts, which are not part of the orig­i­nal text, are fol­lowed by page num­bers that cor­re­late with the…

A new report by Michael Mears of the Office of the Multi-County Public Defender pro­vides a detailed exam­i­na­tion of every death penal­ty tri­al in Georgia since the state passed its cur­rent death penal­ty statute in 1973. This resource con­tains a list­ing of death penal­ty cas­es by name of the defen­dant, name of the coun­ty, name of the judi­cial cir­cuit, as well as the dis­po­si­tion of every death penal­ty case. It also pro­vides a brief overview of the his­toric role Georgia has played in the Supreme…