Publications & Testimony

Stating that​“this Court is unwill­ing to con­tort the law of fed­er­al kid­nap­ping,” and that fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors failed to present suf­fi­cient evi­dence to sup­port that charge dur­ing the recent cap­i­tal mur­der tri­al of Jay Lentz, a fed­er­al judge in Virginia has over­turned the jury’s guilty ver­dict in the case. In the rul­ing, U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee crit­i­cized the gov­ern­ment for try­ing what he deemed a local homi­cide case in fed­er­al court. Earlier, the…

After years of sup­port­ing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, for­mer San Francisco pros­e­cu­tor Bill Fazio recent­ly changed his posi­tion on the death penal­ty. Fazio, who now serves as a defense attor­ney, stat­ed,​“Life with­out parole is a viable alter­na­tive.” He not­ed that he began to recon­sid­er his stance on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment after the U.S. Court of Appeals reversed his sole death penal­ty con­vic­tion. Fazio not­ed,​“It was an error by the tri­al judge, and it made me realize that…

Governor Rod Blagojevich has signed a mea­sure requir­ing police to record their inter­ro­ga­tions of homi­cide sus­pects. The gov­er­nor’s sig­na­ture makes Illinois the first state to offi­cial­ly imple­ment such a pol­i­cy. Blagojevich, a for­mer pros­e­cu­tor, not­ed that his pre­vi­ous­­ly-voiced con­cerns that video taped inter­ro­ga­tions would impede police from doing their job had been over­rid­den by the knowl­edge that the tapes will yield​“clear­er, more reli­able” evidence for…

After spend­ing a quar­ter cen­tu­ry in prison, includ­ing time on Ohio’s death row, Timothy Howard and Gary Lemar James have been freed from prison and all charges against the men will be dropped. The men, who have main­tained their inno­cence since their arrest in 1976, were freed, accord­ing to Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien,​“in the inter­est of jus­tice.” O’Brien stat­ed,​“The les­son to be learned is what I said in the let­ter I sent a year and a half ago. We don’t want…

In a recent Letter to the Editor that appeared in The New York Times, for­mer Governor Mario Cuomo urged New Yorkers to rethink the death penal­ty in light of recent innocence cases…

In a rul­ing that could affect near­ly every death row inmate in the state, the North Carolina Supreme Court has upheld the prac­tice of using indict­ments with­out aggra­vat­ing fac­tors in mur­der cas­es. The rul­ing came in the case of death row inmate Henry Lee Hunt. Hunt’s attor­neys had argued that, in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s rul­ing in Ring v. Arizona, fail­ure to include aggra­vat­ing fac­tors in first-degree mur­der indict­ments is a vio­la­tion of the due process clause of…

“The Execution of Wanda Jean,” an HBO doc­u­men­tary direct­ed by Liz Garbus of Moxie Firecracker Films, and a series of news arti­cles by the staff of the York Daily Record, includ­ing exten­sive cov­er­age of the release of Pennsylvania native Ray Krone from Arizona’s death row, will receive hon­ors dur­ing the Death Penalty Information Center’s (DPIC) Seventh Annual Thurgood Marshall Journalism Awards at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. The pro­gram will also feature keynote…

A recent arti­cle by Alex Kotlowitz in the New York Times Magazine exam­ined why jurors who affirmed their will­ing­ness to impose a death sen­tence are increas­ing­ly vot­ing for life in cap­i­tal cas­es. The…

Brian Deegan, a mag­is­trate in South Australia who lost his son in the October 2002 Sari night­club bomb­ing in Bali, recent­ly stat­ed that he believes the ter­ror­ists who com­mit­ed that crime should not receive the death penal­ty, but should be sen­tenced to a term of life in prison with­out parole. In an opin­ion piece in The Australian,…

As the Texas leg­isla­tive ses­sion came to a close, crim­i­nal jus­tice reform advo­cates gave law­mak­ers a fail­ing grade for their work in address­ing prob­lems in the state’s legal sys­tem. Senator Rodney Ellis of Houston joined an array of legal experts to crit­i­cize the state leg­is­la­tors’ inabil­i­ty to pass mea­sures to end the exe­cu­tion of juve­nile offend­ers, to strength­en the con­sular noti­fi­ca­tion process for for­eign nation­als, and to require the Texas Board of…