Studies

William Sessions, for­mer head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, recent­ly point­ed to cas­es of defen­dants who were exe­cut­ed based in part on faulty hair and fiber analy­sis in call­ing for changes in the use of foren­sic evi­dence. In an op-ed in the Washington Times, Sessions told the sto­ry of Benjamin Boyle, who was exe­cut­ed in Texas in 1997. His con­vic­tion was based on test­ing con­duct­ed by an FBI crime lab that an offi­cial review lat­er deter­mined to be unre­li­able and ​“sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly unsup­port­able.” Neither state offi­cials nor Boyle’s attor­neys were…

Jim Petro served as Ohio’s Attorney General and presided over 18 exe­cu­tions. However, he aban­doned his sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment after see­ing the risks of wrong­ful exe­cu­tions: ​“Our jus­tice sys­tem is based on the deci­sion-mak­ing of human beings, and human beings are fal­li­ble. We make mis­takes and our judg­ments are influ­enced by bias­es and imper­fect moti­va­tions. Implementing the death penal­ty makes our errors per­ma­nent and impos­si­ble to rem­e­dy.” Recently, he called on the Ohio leg­is­la­ture to adopt the reforms rec­om­mend­ed by a Task Force appoint­ed by the state Supreme Court,…

The lat­est edi­tion of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Death Row, USA showed an ongo­ing decline in the size of the death row pop­u­la­tion. The num­ber of pris­on­ers on death row decreased from 3,070 on January 1, 2014, to 3,054 on April 1. The new total rep­re­sent­ed a 12% drop from 10 years ear­li­er, when the death row pop­u­la­tion was 3,487. California con­tin­ued to have the largest death row, with 743 inmates, fol­lowed by Florida (404), Texas (276), Alabama (201), and Pennsylvania (194). The states with the high­est per­cent­age of…

A new report from the National Institute of Justice exam­ines ways to reduce and pre­vent errors, such as the wrong­ful con­vic­tion of an inno­cent per­son. The report pro­pos­es ​“sen­tinel event reviews” — the exam­i­na­tion of mis­takes with a view of find­ing sys­temic prob­lems. The report uses the death penal­ty exon­er­a­tion of John Thompson in Louisiana to illus­trate its goal: ​“In Connick [v. Thompson], the tri­al pros­e­cu­tor with­held crime lab results from the defense, removed a blood sam­ple from the evi­dence room, and failed to dis­close that Thompson had been implicated…

A 2014 study by Professors Cynthia Willis-Esqueda (pic­tured) of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) and Russ K.E. Espinoza of California State University found that white jurors were more like­ly to rec­om­mend a death sen­tence for Latino defen­dants than for white defen­dants in California. Researchers gave case descrip­tions to 500 white and Latino peo­ple who had report­ed for jury duty in south­ern California, then asked them to choose a sen­tence of life with­out parole or death. The descrip­tion was based on a real cap­i­tal case, but each juror was giv­en one…

A new report from The Death Penalty Project, ​“The Inevitability of Error,” exam­ines the risk of wrong­ful con­vic­tions in cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tions through case stud­ies from around the world. The report ana­lyzes recent inno­cence cas­es in Japan, the U.S., Taiwan, and Sierra Leone, as well as old­er cas­es from the United Kingdom that encour­aged abo­li­tion efforts there. Among the cas­es includ­ed are those of Iwao Hakamada, who was released after 47 years on death row in Japan, and Kirk Bloodsworth, the first per­son in the U.S. exon­er­at­ed from death row by…

On July 31, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder spoke about the death penal­ty review under­way at the Department of Justice and the need for greater trans­paren­cy in lethal injec­tion meth­ods. Holder said he was ​“great­ly trou­bled” by the recent botched exe­cu­tions, adding that states should pro­vide more infor­ma­tion about the drugs they plan to use. He said, “[F]or the state to exer­cise that great­est of all pow­ers, to end a human life, it seems to me… that trans­paren­cy would be a good thing, and to share the infor­ma­tion about what…

On July 19 Prof. Charles Ogletree of Harvard University Law School wrote in the Washington Post about the future of the death penal­ty in the U.S. Noting that the U.S. Supreme Court recent­ly affirmed (Hall v. Florida) that exe­cut­ing defen­dants with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ties serves ​“no legit­i­mate peno­log­i­cal pur­pose,” Prof. Ogletree said this rea­son­ing could be applied to the whole death penal­ty: ​“The over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of those fac­ing exe­cu­tion today have what the court termed in Hall to be dimin­ished cul­pa­bil­i­ty. Severe func­tion­al deficits are the rule, not the excep­tion, among…

According to a report released on July 16 by the Inspector General’s Office of the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation failed to pro­vide time­ly notice to many cap­i­tal defen­dants that their cas­es were under review for pos­si­bly inac­cu­rate tes­ti­mo­ny by FBI experts. Some of these defen­dants were exe­cut­ed with­out being informed of the mis­lead­ing tes­ti­mo­ny pro­vid­ed by the gov­ern­ment. The report stat­ed: “[T]he FBI did not take suf­fi­cient steps to ensure that the cap­i­tal cas­es were the Task Force’s top pri­or­i­ty. We found that it took the…

The the­o­ry of the mod­ern death penal­ty is that it is to be reserved for the ​“worst of the worst” offend­ers. In 2005 the U.S. Supreme Court deter­mined (Roper v. Simmons) that those under age 18 at the time of their crime were less cul­pa­ble than old­er defen­dants and should be exclud­ed from the pos­si­bil­i­ty of exe­cu­tion. However, a recent paper by Hollis Whitson (l.) argued that sci­en­tif­ic research on old­er ado­les­cents implied that the Court’s analy­sis should also apply to those under 21. Whitson cit­ed neu­ro­science research show­ing, ​“that…