Studies

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…

The Tulsa World of Oklahoma recent­ly con­duct­ed an inves­ti­ga­tion into the state’s exe­cu­tion pro­to­col in the wake of the botched exe­cu­tion of Clayton Lockett in April. Comparing Oklahoma’s pro­to­col to those of 19 oth­er states, the study found that Oklahoma lacks basic safe­guards fol­lowed in many oth­er states. Among those are reg­u­lar train­ing for the exe­cu­tion team, the avail­abil­i­ty of back­up drugs in the event of a prob­lem with the…

The most recent issue of The Angolite, a mag­a­zine writ­ten and pub­lished by pris­on­ers at Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, which hous­es the state’s death row, con­tains a num­ber of arti­cles rel­e­vant to the death penal­ty. The first, ​“Shifting Values,” dis­cuss­es the declin­ing use of the death penal­ty through an exam­i­na­tion of devel­op­ments in 2013. A sec­ond arti­cle, ​“Death House Cat & Mouse,” reports on Louisiana’s com­pli­cat­ed strug­gle to obtain lethal injection…

The American Bar Association has released a new pub­li­ca­tion, The State of Criminal Justice 2014, exam­in­ing major issues, trends and sig­nif­i­cant changes in America’s crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. The chap­ter devot­ed to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment was writ­ten by Ronald Tabak, an attor­ney at Skadden Arps. Tabak presents evi­dence of the declin­ing use of the death penal­ty in death sen­tences and exe­cu­tions, par­tic­u­lar­ly not­ing the grow­ing geo­graph­ic iso­la­tion of the…

Following the botched exe­cu­tion of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma in April, President Obama ordered the Justice Department to review death penal­ty pro­ce­dures in the states. Though a time­line for the study has not been released, the depart­ment has already reached out to at least one orga­ni­za­tion, the Constitution Project, which pro­posed sev­er­al reforms in its recent report on the death penal­ty, includ­ing the estab­lish­ing of an office at the…

The Bureau of Justice Statistics recent­ly issued a new report, ​“Capital Punishment, 2012,” ana­lyz­ing the use of the death penal­ty in that year and reveal­ing over­all trends since the death penal­ty was rein­stat­ed. The report not­ed that 2012 was ​“the twelfth con­sec­u­tive year in which the num­ber of inmates under sen­tence of death decreased.” Among the sta­tis­tics not report­ed else­where, BJS not­ed that the time between sen­tenc­ing and exe­cu­tion in 2012 was 15.8 years. The average…

On May 7, the Constitution Project released a new report, Irreversible Error, call­ing for reforms in many aspects of the death penal­ty sys­tem. The Project’s Death Penalty Committee, which con­sists of renowned experts on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, made sug­ges­tions for reduc­ing the risk of exe­cut­ing the inno­cent and improv­ing the fair­ness of cap­i­tal cas­es from arrest and inter­ro­ga­tion, through pros­e­cu­tion and appeals, to the execution…

President Obama has ordered Attorney General Eric Holder to review the appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty in the U.S. fol­low­ing the failed exe­cu­tion of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma on April 29. The President not­ed con­cerns about inno­cence and racial bias: ​“In the appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty in this coun­try, we have seen sig­nif­i­cant prob­lems — racial bias, uneven appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty, you know, sit­u­a­tions in which there were…

On April 28 a study pub­lished in the pres­tigous Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indi­cat­ed that far more inno­cent peo­ple have been sen­tenced to death than those found through the legal process. According to the study, many inno­cent defen­dants are prob­a­bly not being iden­ti­fied because they were tak­en off death row and giv­en a less­er sen­tence. The rate of exon­er­a­tions for those sen­tenced to death would be over twice as high if all cas­es were giv­en the…

In 2011, the Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court appoint­ed a blue-rib­bon Commission to review the state’s death penal­ty and to make rec­om­men­da­tions for reform. On April 10, the Commission pre­pared to announce 56 rec­om­men­da­tions for chang­ing the death penal­ty,…