Studies

The nation’s death rows con­tin­ue to shrink more rapid­ly than new defen­dants are being sen­tenced to death, accord­ing to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) sta­tis­ti­cal brief, ​“Capital Punishment, 2016,” released April 30, 2018. (Click image to enlarge.) The sta­tis­ti­cal brief, which ana­lyzes infor­ma­tion on those under sen­tence of death in the United States as of December 31, 2016, con­tains offi­cial gov­ern­ment fig­ures doc­u­ment­ing con­tin­u­ing declines in exe­cu­tions, new death…

In Pennsylvania, death-row pris­on­ers whose con­vic­tions or death sen­tences are over­turned in state or fed­er­al post-con­vic­tion appeals are almost nev­er resen­tenced to death, a new Death Penalty Information Center study has revealed. Since Pennsylvania adopt­ed its cur­rent death-penal­ty statute in September 1978, post-con­vic­tion courts have reversed pris­on­ers’ cap­i­tal con­vic­tions or death sen­tences in 170 cas­es. Defendants have faced cap­i­tal retri­als or resen­tenc­ings in 137 of those cas­es, and…

Use of the death penal­ty declined world­wide in 2017, accord­ing to the Amnesty International’s annu­al glob­al report on capital…

“In 2016, at least 60 pris­on­ers were exon­er­at­ed after hav­ing been con­demned to death, in coun­tries across the geo­graph­i­cal and polit­i­cal spec­trum,” accord­ing to a new report on wrong­ful cap­i­tal con­vic­tions by the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide. The report, Justice Denied: A Global Study of Wrongful Death Row Convictions, ana­lyzes risk fac­tors for exe­cut­ing the inno­cent that are endem­ic in death penal­ty cas­es irre­spec­tive of where they are tried, and…

The cer­tain­ty of appre­hen­sion, not the sever­i­ty of pun­ish­ment, is more effec­tive as a deter­rent. So argues Daniel S. Nagin (pic­tured), one of the nation’s fore­most schol­ars on deter­rence and crim­i­nal jus­tice pol­i­cy, in his chap­ter on Deterrence in the recent­ly released Academy for Justice four-vol­ume study, Reforming Criminal Justice. Reviewing deter­rence schol­ar­ship since the 1960s and five lead­ing stud­ies from the past two decades, Dr.

A Death Penalty Information Center analy­sis of U.S. mur­der data from 1987 through 2015 has found no evi­dence that the death penal­ty deters mur­der or pro­tects police. Instead, the evi­dence shows that mur­der rates, includ­ing mur­ders of police offi­cers, are con­sis­tent­ly high­er in death-penal­ty states than in states that have abol­ished the death penal­ty. And far from expe­ri­enc­ing increas­es in mur­der rates or open sea­son on law enforce­ment, the data show that states that have abol­ished the death…

The American Bar Association has released a new pub­li­ca­tion, The State of Criminal Justice 2017, an annu­al report exam­in­ing major issues, trends, and sig­nif­i­cant changes in America’s crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. In a chap­ter devot­ed to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, Ronald J. Tabak, chair of the Death Penalty Committee of the ABA’s Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities, describes sig­nif­i­cant death penal­ty cas­es and devel­op­ments over the past year. Tabak…

Four coun­ties that rank among the most aggres­sive users of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the United States have pro­longed pat­terns of pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct, accord­ing to a new report by the Harvard-based Fair Punishment Project. The report, ​“The Recidivists: Four Prosecutors Who Repeatedly Violate the Constitution,” exam­ined state appel­late court deci­sions in California, Louisiana, Missouri, and Tennessee from 2010 – 2015, and found that pros­e­cu­tors in Orange County, CA;…

Lynching has long been regard­ed as a region­al phe­nom­e­non, but in an updat­ed edi­tion of its land­mark 2015 report ​“Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has now doc­u­ment­ed more than 300 lynch­ings of African Americans in states out­side the Deep South. ​“Racial ter­ror lynch­ing was a nation­al prob­lem,” said EJI Director Bryan Stevenson (pic­tured). More than six mil­lion African American migrants fled ​“as refugees and exiles…

No death penal­ty jury has ever found a defen­dant charged with inten­tion­al mur­der to be inel­i­gi­ble for the death penal­ty under Georgia​’s intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty law, accord­ing to a new empir­i­cal study pub­lished in Georgia State University Law…