Studies

A nine-mem­ber death penal­ty assess­ment team appoint­ed by the American Bar Association​’s (ABA) Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project has deter­mined that Arizona​’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment laws are plagued with seri­ous prob­lems and that the state should imme­di­ate­ly take steps to improve the fair­ness and accu­ra­cy of the sys­tem. A report issued by the assess­ment team iden­ti­fied sig­nif­i­cant prob­lems, includ­ing the lack of a cen­tral­ized sys­tem of pro­vid­ing indigent defense…

A new report issued by the American Bar Association’s Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project found that Alabama’s death penal­ty fails to meet fun­da­men­tal ABA stan­dards of fair­ness and accu­ra­cy. An eight-mem­ber assess­ment team assem­bled in Alabama by the ABA was so trou­bled by its find­ings that it called for a mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions in the…

According to the FBI’s Preliminary Uniform Crime Report for 2005, all regions of the coun­try expe­ri­enced a rise in mur­der rates in 2005. The Midwest had the largest increase (5.8%) and the West had the small­est increase (3.2%). Based on the increas­es report­ed by the FBI and the pre­vi­ous year’s mur­der rates, the South again had the high­est mur­der rate in the coun­try– 6.9 mur­ders per 100,000 peo­ple – fol­lowed by the West (5.9), Midwest (5.0) and the Northeast (4.4). The rates for…

A new report issued by the American Bar Association’s Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project found that Alabama’s death penal­ty fails to meet fun­da­men­tal ABA stan­dards of fair­ness and accu­ra­cy. An eight-mem­ber assess­ment team assem­bled in Alabama by the ABA was so trou­bled by its find­ings that it called for a mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions in the state. The team urged law­mak­ers to take action to ensure effec­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tion at every stage of the cap­i­tal process, to protect…

The lat­est edi­tion of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s ​“Death Row USA” shows that the num­ber of peo­ple on the death row in the United States is con­tin­u­ing to decline, falling to 3,370 as of April 1, 2006. The size of death row increased every year between 1976 and 2000, but since then it has been in a slow…

“Looking Deathworthy: Perceived Stereotypicality of Black Defendants Predicts Capital-Sentencing Outcomes” con­tains new research on race con­duct­ed by pro­fes­sors from Stanford, UCLA, Yale and Cornell, led by Prof. Jennifer Eberhardt. The arti­cle, to be pub­lished in the May 2006 edi­tion of Psychological Science, exam­ines whether the like­li­hood of being sen­tenced to death is influ­enced by the degree to which a black defen­dant is per­ceived to have a stereo­typ­i­cal­ly black appear­ance. Using…

Amnesty International’s most recent death penal­ty report, ​“The Death Penalty Worldwide: Developments in 2005,” revealed a sub­stan­tial drop in record­ed exe­cu­tions around the world, as well as a grow­ing num­ber of nations that have aban­doned the death penal­ty. According to the report, four nations account­ed for 94% of the 2,148 record­ed exe­cu­tions car­ried out around the world in 2005, a total that is sig­nif­i­cant­ly less than the 3,797 exe­cu­tions record­ed in 2004 (how­ev­er, in many…

A new report issued by Human Rights Watch today notes that most U.S. states use exe­cu­tion meth­ods that need­less­ly risk excru­ci­at­ing pain for inmates sub­ject­ed to lethal injec­tions. The report, ​“So Long as They Die: Lethal Injections in the United States,” exam­ines the his­to­ry of lethal injec­tions and the wide­spread use of pro­to­cols that were cre­at­ed three decades ago with no sci­en­tif­ic research. ​“The U.S. takes more care killing dogs than peo­ple. Just because a pris­on­er may have…

The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, a blue-rib­bon pan­el estab­lished by the state leg­is­la­ture to study and review the death penal­ty and relat­ed mat­ters in California, has pro­posed sig­nif­i­cant changes in the use of eye­wit­ness iden­ti­fi­ca­tion in California courts. The com­mis­sion called on leg­is­la­tors to pass a bill requir­ing the attor­ney gen­er­al’s office to con­vene a task force to devel­op guide­lines for new pro­ce­dures and train­ings in eyewitness identification.