Studies

THREE NEW RESOURCES NOW AVAILABLE: The American Bar Association’s Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project’s Assessment of Georgia’s Death Penalty Released: January 31, 2006. Amnesty International’s Report on ​“The Execution of Mentally Ill Offenders” Released: January 31, 2006. The Constitution Project’s fol­low-up report: ​“Mandatory Justice: The Death Penalty Revisited” February 1, 2006. (DPIC will pro­vide more infor­ma­tion on each of…

Professor Ray Paternoster of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland was the senior author of a 2003 state-com­mis­sioned review of the role that race and geog­ra­phy play in Maryland’s death penal­ty prac­tice. He recent­ly wrote about the study’s find­ings in the Baltimore…

A New Jersey Policy Perspectives report con­clud­ed that the state’s death penal­ty has cost tax­pay­ers $253 mil­lion since 1983, a fig­ure that is over and above the costs that would have been incurred had the state uti­lized a sen­tence of life with­out parole instead of death. The study exam­ined the costs of death penal­ty cas­es to pros­e­cu­tor offices, pub­lic defend­er offices, courts, and cor­rec­tion­al facil­i­ties. The report’s authors said that the cost esti­mate is ​“very con­ser­v­a­tive” because…

Incar­cer­a­tion and Crime: A Complex Relationship, a new report by The Sentencing Project, exam­ines the finan­cial and social costs of incar­cer­a­tion, and eval­u­ates the lim­it­ed effec­tive­ness it has on crime rates. The report notes that the num­ber of peo­ple incar­cer­at­ed in the United States has risen by more than 500% over the past three decades, up from 330,000 peo­ple in 1972 to 2.1 mil­lion peo­ple today. Though an increase in the num­ber of offend­ers who are incar­cer­at­ed has…

The Bureau of Justice Statistics released its lat­est report on the sta­tus of the death penal­ty in the U.S., Capital Punishment, 2004, on November 13. According to the report, the nation’s death row pop­u­la­tion, exe­cu­tions, and the num­ber of peo­ple giv­en death sen­tences last year all declined. There were 3,315 peo­ple on state and fed­er­al death rows at the con­clu­sion of 2004, 63 few­er than in 2003. Last year, 125 peo­ple were sen­tenced to death, the fewest since 1973. Twelve…

According to a new report released by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), struc­tur­al and pro­ce­dur­al flaws in Alabama’s crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem stack the deck against fair tri­als and appro­pri­ate sen­tenc­ing for those fac­ing the death penal­ty. The report, Broken Justice: The Death Penalty in Alabama, details unfair and dis­crim­i­na­to­ry prac­tices in the state’s admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty. It con­cen­trates on six major areas of con­cern: inad­e­quate defense, pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al misconduct,…

Even as the use of the death penal­ty con­tin­ued to decline in the United States, the num­ber of mur­ders and the nation­al mur­der rate dropped in 2004. According to the recent­ly released FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2004, the nation’s mur­der rate fell by 3.3%, declin­ing to 5.5 mur­ders per 100,000 peo­ple in 2004. By region, the Northeast, which accounts for less than 1% of all U.S. exe­cu­tions, con­tin­ued to have the nation’s low­est mur­der rate, 4.2. The Midwest had a mur­der rate of 4.7, and the…

RACE AND THE DEATH PENALTY IN CALIFORNIA A recent study to be pub­lished in the Santa Clara Law Review found that the race of the vic­tim in the under­ly­ing mur­der great­ly affect­ed whether a defen­dant would be sen­tenced to death.Generally, there are more Hispanic and African American vic­tims of mur­der in California: –California Murder Victims 1990 – 1999 — Office of Vital Statistics; based on mur­ders where race of vic­tim was known; Whites, African American, and Other are…

Recent research has revealed a close cor­re­la­tion between the U.S. states that his­tor­i­cal­ly car­ried out the most lynch­ings and the states that today have the high­est homi­cide rates and most death…

A two-year Dallas Morning News inves­ti­ga­tion of jury selec­tion in Dallas County has revealed that pros­e­cu­tors exclude blacks from juries at more than twice the rate they reject whites, and that race is the most impor­tant per­son­al trait affect­ing which jurors pros­e­cu­tors reject. The paper’s review also found that when poten­tial black and white jurors answered key ques­tions about crim­i­nal jus­tice issues the same way, blacks were reject­ed at a high­er rate. The study exam­ined 108 (non-death…