Publications & Testimony

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…

“The Problem of False Confessions in a Post-DNA World,” a recent study published in the North Carolina Law Review, found that juvenile offenders were involved in 33% of the cases where the defendant confessed to a crime that he or she did not commit. Ninety-two percent of the cases involved false confessions from individuals under the age of 40, and more than half were under the age of 25. According to the study’s authors, law professors Richard Leo of the University of California at Irvine and…

Decatur Daily April 23, 2004 Editorial Fledgling Attorney General Troy King has picked an interesting first major stance since being appointed to office by Gov. Bob Riley. It’s a safe one. He’s going to fight bills that would put a moratorium on the death penalty. Politically, standing up against those who oppose the death penalty is a popular fight in Alabama, where even losing the fight could be a winning situation. Mr. King already knows he has legislative support to fight these bills…

By a vote of 29 – 19, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights passed a resolution calling on all nations to declare a moratorium on executions. The resolution cited concerns about the fairness and accuracy of the death penalty. In order to address these problems, the resolution calls on nations that no longer use the death penalty to remove it from their laws, and for countries that continue to carry out executions to limit the number of crimes that may be punished by death. The resolution…

Lakeland Ledger April 22, 2004 Editorial The Florida Legislature has always been strong on capital punishment and has recoiled against any limitations imposed by the courts. At the same time, it has failed to clarify a key question relating to the death penalty: How young is too young when sentencing a killer to death? Oddly, the Legislature has avoided that question. The result has been that the courts have been forced to step in. As it stands now, a person cannot be sentenced to death if…

Concorde (NH) Monitor April 22, 2004 Editorial A civilized society does not kill children, not even children who’ve killed. According to Amnesty International, the United States has executed more juveniles over the past decade than all other nations combined. Of the 22 American children executed for their crimes since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, 13 were put to death in Texas. Virginia (three), Oklahoma (two) and Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, Missouri (one each) accounted…

Researchers at the University of Michigan identified 328 criminal cases, including 73 death penalty cases, over the last 15 years in which the defendant was ultimately exonerated. The study suggested that many more innocent people are in prison today. Most of the cases studied involved murder and rape, crimes that are subjected to the most intense police investigation but that can also provide defendants with the opportunity to prove their innocence based on DNA evidence. Of the 328 cases of…