Studies

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…

UN Report Shows Declining Use of the Death Penalty Worldwide A report from the Secretary-General to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations on the status of the death penalty worldwide shows a declining use of capital punishment: The report shows an encouraging trend towards abolition and restriction of the use of capital punishment in most countries. It also shows that much remains to be done in the implementation of the safeguards guaranteeing protection of the rights of…

A new study from the Texas Defender Service calls for substantial changes in the way Texas handles capital murder cases. The report recommends that Texas implement a series of reforms, including uniform investigation procedures, a life-without-parole sentencing option, and a statewide public defender’s office. Drawing from recommendations made by the blue-ribbon Illinois Commission on Capital Punishment that was established to address wrongful convictions in that state, the Texas Defender…

An independent audit of Virginia’s central crime laboratory initiated by the present governor found that the lab had botched DNA tests in the death penalty case of Earl Washington (pictured). The finding prompted Gov. Mark Warner to order a review of 150 other criminal cases and the development of procedures to insulate the lab from outside political pressures. The audit was conducted by the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors. It found that the Virginia lab’s internal review…

In a comprehensive study covering 20 years and thousands of capital cases in Ohio, the Associated Press found that the death penalty has been applied in an uneven and often arbitrary fashion. Among the conclusions of the study that analyzed 1,936 indictments reported to the Ohio Supreme Court by counties with capital cases from October 1981 through 2002 were: Offenders facing a death penalty charge for killing a white person were twice as likely to go to death row than if they had killed a…

In the most comprehensive examination of a statute in the history of the New York State Legislature, state lawmakers released a report highlighting the testimony of 170 witnesses at five statewide hearings on the state’s death penalty law. The report, issued by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver along with the Chairs of the Committees on Codes, the Judiciary and Correction, is a thorough examination of the statute and its troubled history. “We have spent more than $170 million administering the…

A two-year study of 11 wrongful conviction cases in Virginia found that mistaken eyewitness identification is the major reason innocent people have been convicted in the state. The report’s recommendations note that Virginia could dramatically reduce the number of wrongful convictions through a series of reforms, such as changing a variety of police procedures, relaxing the state’s 21-day rule to allow evidence of innocence to be considered beyond this time restriction, ensuring that…

According to state and federal records obtained by The Los Angeles Times, maintaining the California death penalty system costs taxpayers more than $114 million a year beyond the cost of simply keeping the convicts locked up for life. This figure does not count the millions more spent on court costs to prosecute capital cases. The Times concluded that Californians and federal taxpayers have paid more than a quarter of a billion dollars for each of the state’s 11 executions, and that it costs…