Publications & Testimony

Three scheduled executions in May — Osvaldo Torres in Oklahoma, Kelsey Patterson in Texas, and Sammy Perkins in North Carolina — raise troubling questions about the application of the death penalty. Torres is a Mexican foreign national whose execution is scheduled for May 18, just weeks after the International Court of Justice ruled that the United States should review the cases of 51 Mexican foreign nationals on death row in the U.S., including Torres’s case. At issue is whether the U.S. violated…

A District Court panel in Florida has endorsed a special verdict form that asks jurors to specify what elements of a crime warrant a death penalty. The District Court certified its decision as a matter of great public importance and asked the Florida Supreme Court to review the rulings, noting “this ruling could affect many cases that may ultimately be reviewed by the Supreme Court.” In the original ruling in the capital case against Alfredie Steele Jr., Pasco County Judge Lynn Tepper required…

After less than five hours of deliberation, jurors in a federal death penalty case in Maryland returned life sentences for two men convicted earlier of federal drug conspiracy charges and firearms violations. The federal case against Michael Taylor and Keon Moses was the first time since 1998 that U.S. prosecutors in Baltimore had sought a death sentence. The life sentences for Taylor and Keon continue a national trend identified last year by the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project.

Daytona Beach News-Journal April 29, 2004 Editorial Florida doesn’t execute children anymore. It hasn’t in 50 years, but nothing in the law says it can’t. Currently the law allows Florida juries to sentence 16-year-olds to death. Three inmates currently on Florida’s death row were 17 when the murders were committed for which they’re condemned. On Tuesday, the state Senate decided it can no longer countenance the statute’s duplicity, reasoning that other Florida laws recognize people under…

North Carolina may become the first state to enact a moratorium on executions through the legislative process. A moratorium measure has already passed their Senate and is awaiting action in the House. A new Web site launched by the North Carolina Coalition for a Moratorium, www.ncmoratorium.org, contains a vast amount of information related to this important issue. Among the topics examined are the quality of counsel, innocence, costs, access to DNA testing, deterrence, race, arbitrariness, and…

St. Petersburg Times April 28, 2004 Editorial Florida once executed a 17-year-old boy only three weeks after his one-day trial for rape before a jury that had taken only two hours to select. At least seven other prisoners, the last in 1954, went to the electric chair at Raiford before they had reached their 18^th birthdays. All were black. But for the racism that permeated this state, it is unlikely that any of them would have been on death row. Of the 19 states that still provide for…

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 House Speaker Johnnie Byrd, who had been…

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 eyewitnesses, Soffar’s…

National Law Journal April 26, 2004 Editorial By Vivian Berger Special to The National Law Journal; Vivian Berger, an NLJ columnist, is a professor emerita at Columbia Law School. Virtually alone among nations, the United States puts to death juvenile killers-youths who were less than 18 years old at the time of their crimes, putting us in the dubious international company of Iran and the Congo. The U.S. Supreme Court has granted certiorari for next term to Roper v. Simmons, allowing the…

St. Petersburg Times April 25, 2004 Editorial When the Florida Legislature proposed a constitutional amendment to protect the death penalty, the measure had the incidental effect of allowing people to be executed for crimes they committed at the age of 16. Sponsors said they didn’t want to do that and promised corrective legislation. That was three years ago. Voters ratified the constitutional amendment a year later. The bill that was promised has yet to pass. Missouri’s attorney general…