Studies
Items: 201 — 210
Nov 08, 2012
STUDIES: FBI Releases 2011 Crime Report Showing Drop in Murder Rates
On October 29, the U.S. Justice Department released the annual FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2011, indicating that the national murder rate dropped 1.5% from 2010. This decline occurred at a time when the use of the death penalty is also decreasing nationally. The Northeast region, which uses the death penalty the least, had the lowest murder rate of the 4 geographic regions, and saw a 6.4% further decrease in its murder rate in 2011, the largest decrease of any region. By contrast, the South, which carries out more executions…
Read MoreOct 09, 2012
COSTS: New Investigation Says Florida Spending Over $1 Million per Death Row Inmate
A newspaper’s investigation into the costs of the death penalty in Florida revealed the state is spending as much as $1 million per inmate just for incarceration and appellate costs. Trial costs would add substantially to the state’s total. Florida has over 400 inmates on death row. For example, keeping J.B. Parker under the special security of death row for 29 years has cost taxpayers $688,000; his appeals cost $296,000, for a total of $984,000. The total for Alfonso Cave has been $1,059,750. Both men remain on death row. Those…
Read MoreOct 04, 2012
Challenges to Jury Selection Continue under North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act
On October 2, Judge Gregory Weeks heard testimony regarding racial bias in jury selection, as three North Carolina death row inmates challenged their sentences under the state’s Racial Justice Act. Prof. Barbara O’Brien of Michigan State University provided statistical evidence of racial bias in the frequent rejection of African-American potential jurors from death penalty trials in the state. According to O’Brien’s study, qualified black jurors were twice as likely to be dismissed from serving in North Carolina death penalty cases as non-black jurors. Her study analyzed jury selection patterns under…
Read MoreAug 17, 2012
NEW VOICES: Growing Concerns in Utah About High Cost of the Death Penalty
Legislators and other officials in Utah are expressing concerns about the high costs of the death penalty and its lack of deterrent effect. Speaking before the Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Interim Committee, Republican State Representative Steve Handy (pictured) said, “In today’s world, the death penalty is so infrequently used that I don’t believe it is any kind of a deterrent.” The Davis County prosecutor, Troy Rawlings, a proponent of the death penalty, nevertheless agreed that replacing the death penalty with life without parole “would remove some of the significant…
Read MoreAug 08, 2012
STUDIES: Colorado’s Death Penalty Rarely Applied and Arbitrary
A new study conducted by law professors Justin Marceau (left) and Sam Kamin (middle) of the University of Denver and Wanda Foglia (right) of Rowan University found that the death penalty in Colorado is applied so rarely as to render the system unconstitutional. The authors concluded that Colorado’s death penalty law is applicable to almost all first-degree murders, but is imposed so infrequently that it fails to provide the kind of careful narrowing of cases required by the Supreme Court in Furman v. Georgia (1972). In this groundbreaking study, the…
Read MoreAug 06, 2012
INTERNATIONAL: Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Calls for Hold on Executions
On August 3, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States (OAS), which includes the U.S., called for a moratorium on executions in the region and released a report reviewing key areas of concern about the death penalty. The report made a series of recommendations for member States, including: — States should refrain from any measure that would expand the application of the death penalty or reintroduce it, — States should take any measures necessary to ensure compliance with the strictest standards of due process…
Read MoreJul 02, 2012
STUDIES: What Percent of Convictions Are Mistaken?
In June, the National Institute of Justice released the results of a study to determine how often modern DNA testing of evidence from older cases confirms the original conviction. The study, conducted by the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C, tested DNA evidence that had been retained in homicide and sexual assault convictions that occurred between 1973 and 1987 in Virginia. Among the homicides, there were not enough cases in which DNA would be determinative of guilt to make statistically reliable conclusions about mistakes. In cases of sexual assault, DNA testing…
Read MoreJun 18, 2012
NEW RESOURCES: Latest Death Row USA Report Now Available
The latest edition of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Death Row USA shows a decrease of 19 inmates between January 1 and April 1, 2012. Over the last decade, the total population of state and federal death rows has decreased significantly, from 3,682 inmates in 2000 to 3,170 inmates as of April 2012. California continues to have the largest death row population (724), followed by Florida (407), Texas (308), Pennsylvania (204), and Alabama (200). Neither California nor Pennsylvania have carried out an execution in the past six years. The report…
Read MoreJun 12, 2012
DETERRENCE: Why the Studies Have Failed to Produce Reliable Results
Two researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Professors Justin Wolfers (pictured) and Betsey Stevenson, recently explained why decades of studies have failed to show a reliable deterrent effect from the death penalty. The authors cited a 2012 report from the National Academy of Sciences, concluding that the deterrence studies of the past 30 years “should not influence policy judgments about capital punishment.” Wolfers and Stevenson explain why these studies cannot be relied on regarding whether the death penalty deters murder: –the death penalty is applied extremely rarely…
Read MoreMay 07, 2012
STUDIES: Racial Composition of Jury Pool Strongly Affects Probability of Convicting Black Defendants
A new study conducted by researchers at Duke University found that the racial composition of jury pools has a profound effect on the probability of a black defendant being convicted. According to the study led by Professor Patrick Bayer of Duke, juries formed from all-white jury pools in Florida convicted black defendants 16 percent more often than white defendants. In cases with no black potential jurors in the jury pool, black defendants were convicted 81 percent of the time, while white defendants were convicted 66 percent of the time. When…
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