Publications & Testimony

The Miami Herald April 7, 2004 Editorial By Rosalynn Carter Florida Senate Bill 224, which would eliminate the death penalty for individuals who commit offenses when they are under the age of 18, is under consideration in Florida during this legislative session. Florida should join 31 other states that recognize that executing juveniles violates current principles of American justice. Our country has sought to protect juveniles in almost every facet of their life, enacting laws prohibiting…

A bill establishing the sentencing option of life without parole in capital cases has been sent to Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius for signature into law. The state legislature passed the bipartisan measure in an attempt to curb costs associated with the death penalty. A legislative audit released in December 2003 found that the average cost of a death penalty case in Kansas is $1.2 million. An advisory group of judges and attorneys who studied the state’s death penalty law last year…

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…