Studies

Dr. Jeffrey Fagan, a professor at Columbia University Law School and a leading national expert on deterrence, testifed that recent studies claiming to show a deterrent effect to capital punishment are fraught with technical and conceptual errors. Fagan noted that a string of recent studies purporting to show that the death penalty can prevent murders use inappropriate methods of statistical analysis, fail to consider all the relevant factors that drive murder rates, and do not consider…

Texas should overhaul its executive clemency process to ensure a fair and equitable justice system, according to a new report by Texas Appleseed and the Texas Innocence Network. The report, “The Quality of Mercy — Safeguarding Justice in Texas Through Clemency Reform,” offers a series of recommendations intended to improve the process, including holding public hearings in clemency cases, establishing standards and objective criteria that can be used to guide clemency decisions, granting members…

New York’s dormant death penalty law fails to meet the minimum standards recommended to ensure accuracy and fairness, according to a new report issued by the Committee on Capital Punishment of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. Based on a comparison of New York’s existing statute to standards established by expert committees in Illinois and Massachusetts, the Committee urged New York lawmakers to thoroughly analyze the state’s statute in light of emerging information about the…

A new American Bar Association study has found that thousands of suspects, including some who are later given death sentences, risk wrongful conviction because they are pressured to accept guilty pleas or have incompetent attorneys. After surveying 22 states, the ABA committee leading the study stated that legal representation for indigent defendants is in “a state of crisis.” In its report, the ABA featured a number of wrongful conviction cases, including the recent release of Lousiana death…

Three-quarters of Americans believe that an innocent person has been executed within the last five years and that conviction is resulting in lower levels of support for the death penalty, according to a study published in the February issue of Criminology & Public Policy. The study, conducted by researchers James D. Unnever of Radford University and Francis T. Cullen of the University of Cincinnati, found that support for capital punishment was significantly lower among both blacks and whites…

A recent study of 18 juvenile offenders on death row in Texas found that nearly all participants experienced serious head traumas in childhood and adolescence, came from extremely violent and/or abusive families, had one or more severe mental illnesses, and had signs of prefrontal brain dysfunction. The study, conducted by Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis of Yale along with other experts, suggests that most of the juvenile offenders on America’s death rows suffer from serious conditions which…

In a recent op-ed in the Albany Times Union, criminal justice expert Scott Christianson asked that state leaders consider New York’s well-documented problems with wrongful convictions before trying to fix the state’s unconstitutional death penalty statute. Christianson, a former state criminal justice official, documented more than 130 cases (most of them involving convictions since 1980), in which innocent persons were convicted (mostly of murder) and sentenced to long prison terms in New…

A recent report issued by the Kansas Judicial Council Death Penalty Advisory Committee examines the state’s application of capital punishment and the hefty price tag of seeking the death penalty. The Committee found that since Kansas reinstated the death penalty in 1994 there were 44 potential capital cases involving minority victims. However, none of these cases resulted in a death sentence. Of the eight defendants in Kansas who did receive death sentences, all of their victims were white. Of…

A new report by the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project discusses the United States’ position on the death penalty in the face of international concerns regarding this practice. The report, How the Death Penalty Weakens U.S. International Interests, notes that many other nations are moving toward abolition of capital punishment and are critical of specific aspects of the death penalty in the U.S. Among the topics featured in this resource are the ongoing international efforts to abolish the death…