Publications & Testimony

As Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney seeks to reinstate capital punishment with a “foolproof” system(see earlier What’s New item), a news investigation has revealed that 22 state men have served lengthy prison terms over the last two decades for rapes and murders that they did not commit. Most of the wrongly convicted inmates were black. Experts say that Boston’s Suffolk County prosecutors have wrongly convicted the second highest number of innocent people in the nation, falling closely behind…

After a review of North Carolina’s death penalty, the North Carolina Academy of Trial Lawyers has issued a series of 11 recommendations that aim to address issues of fairness and accuracy in the state’s capital punishment statutes. In addition to recommendations addressing hidden evidence, mistaken eyewitness identifications, discrimination, and unreliable confessions, the group urged North Carolina lawmakers to enact a moratorium on executions while they consider implementing reforms to make…

Questions about the accuracy and fairness of Alabama’s death penalty continue to surface as illustrated by a series of recent federal court rulings granting two new trials and one new sentencing hearing. All of the rulings were based on inadequate representation provided to the defendants. “Counsel simply provided no defense to the death penalty,” Chief U.S. District Judge U.W. Clemon of Birmingham wrote March 31 in giving one of the inmates a new trial. The man has been on death row 22 years.

District attorneys from several Massachusetts counties, including Suffolk, Norfolk, Middlesex, Essex and Barnstable, had strong reservations about Governor Mitt Romney’s attempt to establish a nearly “foolproof” death penalty system in the state. Some noted that nothing can eliminate the possibility of human error in such cases. The district attorneys said that the state’s medical examiner’s office and crime labs are currently overwhelmed with work, and that the labs do not have the capacity to…

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…