Studies

The Death Penalty Project of London recently published A Penalty Without Legitimacy: The Mandatory Death Penalty In Trinidad And Tobago (2009), a collection of papers presented at a conference in Trinidad & Tobago in March 2009. The papers include a study of opinions of judges, prosecutors, and counsel on the use of the mandatory death penalty in Trinidad and Tobago and ways to bring its practice in line with other countries that have retained the death penalty. The report also includes…

A recent study by Professor Michael Radelet and Traci Lacock of the University of Colorado found that 88% of the nation’s leading criminologists do not believe the death penalty is an effective deterrent to crime. The study, Do Executions Lower Homicide Rates? The Views of Leading Criminologists, published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Crimonology, concluded, “There is overwhelming consensus among America’s top criminologists that the empirical research conducted on the deterrence question…

In Pennsylvania, the state goes through the expensive and time-consuming process of trying many death penalty cases and fighting appeals, but almost all cases end with a life sentence. According to a recent Associated Press study of what happens in capital cases in the state, 124 death sentences have been overturned and resentenced. When these cases went through the justice system a second time with the original errors corrected, 95% (118) resulted in life sentences or less. Only 6 inmates were…

The Innocence Project has released a new report pointing to the problems with eyewitness identifications in criminal cases and offering recommendations for making the system more reliable. The report, “Reevaluating Lineups: Why Witnesses Make Mistakes and How to Reduce the Chance of a Misidentification,” states that over 175 people (including some who were sentenced to death) have been wrongfully convicted based, in part, on eyewitness misidentification and later proven innocent through DNA…

A new report, “Double Tragedies,” addresses the question of whether people with severe mental illness should face the death penalty. The report was authored by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights (MVFHR) and called for treatment and prevention instead of execution for such offenders. The report, based on extensive interviews with 21 family members in 10 different states, calls the death penalty “inappropriate and unwarranted” for people…