Studies

A recent study of Colorado’s death penalty concluded that the punishment is applied so rarely and without clear statutory standards as to render it constitutionally unfair. Professors Justin Marceau (left) and Sam Kamin (center) from the University of Denver College of Law, and Professor Wanda Foglia (right) of Rowan University examined murder convictions in the state from 1999 to 2010. The authors discovered that, while the death penalty was an option in approximately 92% of first degree…

Officials in Indiana recently discussed how rarely the death penalty is applied in the state and the issues that raises regarding its purpose. Professor Joel Schuum of the McKinney School of Law in Indiana chaired a study by the American Bar Association that found “only a few of Indiana’s murder cases result in a prosecutor seeking a death sentence, fewer still result in the imposition of a death sentence by a jury or judges, and only a handful over the past 3 decades have resulted in the…

Two new reports on the death penalty are available from the international community. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States recently released a report containing excerpts from the most important death-penalty decisions issued by the IACHR in the past fifteen years, including cases from Barbados, Cuba, Guatemala, Guyana, Grenada, Jamaica, Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States. The International Commission against the Death…

The theory of the death penalty is that prosecutors select offenders who have committed aggravated murder and obtain death sentences for the most heinous offenders through a scrupulous trial with full due process. The reality in Pennsylvania is radically different. Hundreds of inmates have been sentenced to death, but of the cases that have completed the appeals process, 100% have been overturned, mostly because of errors in the conviction or sentencing stages. (Three inmates were executed, but…

A recent Gallup Poll measured Americans’ abstract support for the death penalty at 63%, the second-lowest level of support for capital punishment since 1978, and a significant decline from 1994, when 80% of respondents were in favor of the death penalty. Gallup noted the results of the poll may have been affected by the fact that it was conducted a few days after the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut. In 2011 Gallup found 61% in support of the death penalty, the lowest level in 40 years. When…

The latest edition of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Death Row USA showed a decrease of 43 inmates under sentence of death from January 1 to October 1, 2012. Over the last decade, the total population of state and federal death rows has decreased significantly, from 3,703 inmates in 2000 to 3,146 inmates as of October 2012. California continues to have the largest death row population (724), followed by Florida (411), Texas (304), Pennsylvania (204), and Alabama (202). Neither California nor…

A new report on the death penalty in Texas found that death sentences have declined by more than 75% since 2002, and more than half of all new death sentences were imposed in the Dallas-Fort Worth area this year, while no new death sentences were imposed in Harris County (Houston) for the third time in five years. The report, “Texas Death Penalty Developments in 2012: The Year in Review” by the Texas Coalition to Abolish Death Penalty, stated there were 9 new death sentences in 2012, near the…

On December 13, North Carolina Superior Court Judge Greg Weeks reduced the sentences of three death row inmates to life without parole after finding that race played a significant role in the selection of the juries in their cases. Applying North Carolina’s revised Racial Justice Act, Judge Weeks relied partially on studies showing prosecutors struck qualified African-American jurors twice as often as other potential jurors, both in Cumberland County and statewide. He also relied on evidence…

According to Gary Syphus of the Legislative Fiscal Analyst’s Office in Utah, seeking the death penalty costs the state an additional $1.6 million per inmate from trial to execution compared to life-without-parole cases. Syphus offered this estimate to the Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Interim Committee of the Utah legislature on November 14. Republican state representative Steve Handy had asked for an examination of the state and local government costs associated with implementing the…