Studies

The Bureau of Justice Statistics typ­i­cal­ly releas­es an annu­al report enti­tled ​“Capital Punishment” con­tain­ing tables and infor­ma­tion on the death penal­ty for the pre­vi­ous year. Although BJS, which is part of the Department of Justice, did not pub­lish a sep­a­rate report for 2006, it did release infor­ma­tion in tab­u­lar form that quan­ti­fies death penal­ty prac­tice in the U.S. Information drawn from BJS’s recent tables…

Professor John Donohue of Yale University’s School of Law recent­ly con­duct­ed a study of death sen­tences in Connecticut and found that seek­ing the death penal­ty often cor­re­lat­ed with the race of the vic­tim and the defen­dant, and not nec­es­sar­i­ly with the sever­i­ty of the crimes, as the law requires. ​“There was basi­cal­ly no ratio­nal sys­tem to explain who got the death penal­ty,” Donohue said. ​“It real­ly is about as ran­dom a process as you can pos­si­bly con­struct.” After review­ing 207 mur­der cases…

David Baker has writ­ten a thor­ough and insight­ful analy­sis of how the death penal­ty in the U.S. has been used against Native Americans. In ​“American Indian Executions in Historical Context,” Baker places the exe­cu­tion of Native Americans with­in the his­to­ry of colo­nial­ism, slav­ery and the con­quer­ing of indige­nous tribes in ear­ly America. The arti­cle traces these devel­op­ments to the cur­rent era, about which the author…

U.S. Supreme Court stayed the Alabama exe­cu­tion sched­uled for night of Jan. 31.Watch the Independent Film Channel’s piece on the U.S. Supreme Court case regard­ing lethal injec­tion, Baze v. Rees. The video also includes a dis­cus­sion of death penal­ty trends with DPIC’s Richard Dieter and an inter­view with for­mer Texas death row chap­lain Carroll Pickett. 2007: DPIC’s Year End ReportHIGHLIGHTS FROM THE 2007 REPORT Executions for the year: 42 — low­est in 13 years %…

The Death Penalty Information Center has released its 13^th annu­al Year End Report, not­ing that exe­cu­tions have dropped to a 13-year low as a de fac­to mora­to­ri­um took hold in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s exam­i­na­tion of lethal injec­tion pro­ce­dures. Death sen­tences have also dropped con­sid­er­ably in recent years. DPIC pro­ject­ed 110 new death sen­tences in 2007 — the low­est num­ber since the death penal­ty was rein­stat­ed in 1976, and a 60% drop since 1999. According to the…

The Justice Project recent­ly released two pol­i­cy reviews that pro­vide sug­ges­tions for pre­vent­ing wrong­ful con­vic­tions in crim­i­nal tri­als. Using research and data from past exon­er­a­tions, the new reports, Expanded Discovery in Criminal Cases and Jailhouse Snitch Testimony, point to the places and sit­u­a­tions in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem where a wrong­ful con­vic­tion can be eas­i­ly pre­vent­ed. Expanded Discovery in Criminal Cases stress­es the impor­tance of full evi­den­tiary dis­cov­ery in…

The Death Penalty Project, an inter­na­tion­al orga­ni­za­tion that pro­vides free legal rep­re­sen­ta­tion for indi­vid­u­als fac­ing the death penal­ty in the Caribbean and Africa, recent­ly pub­lished A Guide to Sentencing in Capital Cases. The guide pro­vides judges, pros­e­cu­tors, and defense attor­neys with infor­ma­tion and sam­ple appeals to help them nav­i­gate the sen­tenc­ing phase in cas­es where a manda­to­ry death sen­tence for a spe­cif­ic crime was abol­ished, leav­ing the for­mer death row inmate to be…

If cur­rent trends con­tin­ue, New York City will like­ly have few­er than 500 homi­cides this year, the low­est num­ber in a 12-month peri­od since reli­able NYC Police Department sta­tis­tics became avail­able in 1963. As of November 18, 2007, the police depart­ment logged 428 killings, the major­i­ty of which were com­mit­ted by friends or acquain­tances or were drug or gang-relat­ed. In fact, only 35 homi­cides this year were com­mit­ted by strangers to the vic­tims, a num­ber described as ​“micro­scop­ic” in a city…

The New York Times inves­ti­gat­ed the post-exon­er­a­tion lives of the 206 for­mer inmates who were wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed and released through DNA evi­dence. Fifty-three of the cas­es involved mur­der con­vic­tions, and more than 25% of those wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed had giv­en a false con­fes­sion or incrim­i­nat­ing state­ment. Working from a list pro­vid­ed by the Innocence Project, the Times gath­ered infor­ma­tion on 137 of the 206 exonerees and were able to inter­view 115 of those. They found that most…

In a recent arti­cle in the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Dr. Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia University describes numer­ous seri­ous errors in recent deter­rence stud­ies, includ­ing improp­er sta­tis­ti­cal analy­ses and miss­ing data and vari­ables that are nec­es­sary to give a full pic­ture of the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. Fagan writes, ​“There is no reli­able, sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly sound evi­dence that [shows that exe­cu­tions] can exert a deter­rent effect…. These flaws and omis­sions in a body of scientific…