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…

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…

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…

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…

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…