Publications & Testimony

Following an International Court of Justice decision that the U.S. violated the rights of 51 Mexican foreign nationals on death row and should reconsider their sentences and convictions, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer is seeking to determine how the Court’s ruling will impact the 28 Mexican foreign nationals on California’s death row. Of the 28 men awaiting execution, two are exempt from the ruling because they had dual citizenship or were advised of their rights under the 1963 Vienna…

Globe and Mail (Canada) April 5, 2004 An astonishing 75 juveniles are on death row in the United States, the only country apart from Iran that formally executes youths 17 and under. In the past dozen years, the remaining holdouts have banned the practice — Yemen and Zimbabwe in 1994, China in 1997 and Pakistan in 2000 — while the Democratic Republic of Congo has placed a moratorium on it. This is not, by and large, an axis of good, yet even it has managed to do the right thing. The U.S.

The International Court of Justice ruled in favor of Mexico and found that the United States violated the rights of almost all of the Mexican foreign nationals on death row in the U.S. The World Court, which is the highest legal organ of the United Nations and is based in The Hague, has ordered that the Mexican cases be reviewed by U.S. courts. The defendants were not informed of their right to talk to consular officials after being arrested, as provided by the Vienna Convention on Consular…

A new study conducted by the Texas Defender Service and Professor John Edens of Sam Houston State University found that state predictions of the future dangerousness of capital defendants were grossly inaccurate. The review examined the cases of 155 inmates in which prosecution expert witnesses had predicted the inmate would be a future danger to society and in which the state asked for the death penalty. However, only 8 (5%) of these inmates later engaged in any seriously assaultive behavior…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5^th Circuit has blocked a Texas District Attorney’s final attempt to restore the death sentence of Victor Hugo Saldano, who was removed from Texas’s death row in 2000 because of the use of racially charged testimony at his trial. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that former Texas Attorney General John Cornyn was right to dismiss Saldano’s death sentence because it was based on state testimony encouraging racial bias. During the penalty phase of Saldano’s 1996…

Victims’ family members in New Jersey and Pennsylvania who may have lost a loved one because of the actions of Charles Cullen, a nurse charged with multiple killings, have voiced support for sparing Cullen the death penalty in exchange for his agreeing to provide information on victims. New Jersey Attorney General Peter Harvey and seven prosecutors in New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania consulted with the victims’ families in deciding whether to seek the death penalty. “It means more for me to…

According to a 2003 internal audit of the Texas Department of Public Safety’s (DPS) crime labs, procedural flaws, security lapses and shoddy documentation problems continue to undermine the quality of DNA laboratory testing results throughout the state. These same problems previously shut down criminal laboratories in Houston and McAllen, and the new findings could throw thousands of criminal cases into doubt. According to public records obtained by the Houston Chronicle, an audit of labs in…

St. Petersburg Times March 30, 2004 Editorial Shamefully, Florida is one of the few places in the entire world where people can be put to death for crimes they committed as juveniles. The Legislature, amid one of its spells of death-penalty hysteria four years ago, spawned a constitutional amendment that, among other things, lowered the minimum age from 17 to 16. At the time, leaders promised to offset that with a law raising the age to 18, which would correspond to the laws of 19 states and…

The Illinois Attorney General’s office will not appeal a federal judge’s ruling finding that it was “reasonably probable” that Gordon Steidl would have been acquitted had the jury heard all of the evidence in his capital murder case. The court granted Steidl a new trial to prove his long-proclaimed innocence. Steidl was given the death penalty for the 1986 murders of a newlywed couple, but his sentence was reduced to life in prison without parole in 1999 following an Illinois State Police…