Studies

A new report released by Amnesty International reveals that the world is mov­ing away from cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Amnesty’s annu­al report showed that only 59 nations retain the death penal­ty, and of those nations, only 25 used it in 2008. Among the nations still employ­ing the death penal­ty, China was the most pro­lif­ic with 1,718 exe­cu­tions, fol­lowed by Iran with 346, Saudi Arabia with 102, United States with 37, Pakistan with 36, and Iraq with 34. Argentina and Uzbekistan…

A cost assess­ment pre­pared for the New Mexico leg­is­la­ture pri­or to its vote on repeal­ing the death penal­ty indi­cat­ed some of the mon­ey that would be saved if the bill was passed. The state will save sev­er­al mil­lion dol­lars each year, accord­ing to the fis­cal impact report by the Public Defender Department. For exam­ple, in the case of State v. Young, the pub­lic defend­er office expend­ed $1.7 mil­lion. They esti­mat­ed that the total cost to the state would be three times…

The num­ber of police offi­cers killed by gun­fire in 2008 dropped by 40% from 2007, down to its low­est lev­el in more than 50 years, accord­ing to a report by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. The report attrib­uted the decline to a new empha­sis on offi­cer safe­ty train­ing and equip­ment. In addi­tion to increased train­ing, more offi­cers are wear­ing body armor and using stun guns to pro­tect them­selves. The over­all num­ber of offi­cers killed in the…

The Death Penalty Information Center’s Year End Report for 2008 record­ed 37 exe­cu­tions for the year that ends today. That is a 12% drop from the 42 exe­cu­tions in 2007. However, based on exe­cu­tions already sched­uled for 2009, the com­ing year may see an increase. There are 23 exe­cu­tions sched­uled for the first five months of 2009, and more dates are like­ly to be added. As was true in 2008, almost all the exe­cu­tions sched­uled are in the south and about half (12 of 23) are in…

Research on death qual­i­fi­ca­tion – the selec­tion of jurors who are qual­i­fied to serve on a cap­i­tal case because they are will­ing to sen­tence some­one to death – has revealed addi­tion­al char­ac­ter­is­tics among such jurors. Professor Brooke Butler of the University of South Florida in Sarasota has stud­ied such jurors and pub­lished her results in the jour­nal of Behavioral Sciences and the Law. Her study, ​“Death qual­i­fi­ca­tion and prej­u­dice: the effect of implic­it racism, sex­ism, and homo­pho­bia on…

States with soft­er gun laws have high­er rates of hand­gun killings, fatal shoot­ings of police offi­cers, and sales of weapons that were used in crimes in oth­er states, accord­ing to a study due out in January 2009. The study’s 38-page report, under­writ­ten by a group of over 300 may­ors and obtained by the Washington Post, focused on track­ing guns used in crimes back to the retail­ers that first sold…

Professsors Saundra Westervelt and Kimberly Cook of the University of North Carolina recent­ly pub­lished a study enti­tled ​“Coping with Innocence After Death Row.” The study appeared in ​“Contexts” pub­lished by the American Sociological Association. The authors stud­ied the lives of 18 inno­cent men and women exon­er­at­ed from death row. The unique research uncov­ers the dif­fi­cul­ty the exonerees have had in adapt­ing to life out­side of prison with­out the process of ​“dela­bel­ing,” or recognition…