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…

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…

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…

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…