Information
- Founded:
- 1990
Notes
A recent study of the military death penalty by Professor David Baldus revealed disparities depending on whether the victim in the underlying crime was also a member of the military or was a civilian. The paper was co-authored by Professors Catherine Grosso and George Woodworth and was published ...
The Tennessee Law Review recently published a compilation of articles and essays from its colloquium, "The Past, Present, and Future of the Death Penalty," held in February 2009. Contributors focused on issues that have influenced capital punishment throughout the course of history...
A recent opinion piece by the Editorial Director of the Clarion-Ledger in Mississippi points to the high costs of the death penalty as a way in which arbitrariness enters into the application of capital punishment: “When is a crime a crime deserving of death?," David Hampton asks. "When the co...
On November 10, the Georgia Supreme Court will hear arguments from attorneys for a capital defendant, Jamie Weis, and from the state concerning a three-and-a-half year delay in bringing his case to trial. For two years of that delay, the Weis defense team had no funding, and for 14 months he was ...
The costs of the death penalty have been a burden on various counties in Mississippi for many years. Quitman County was forced to raise taxes for three years and borrowed $150,000 to provide legal counsel to Robert Simon and Anthony Carr, who were sentenced to death for murders committed in 1...
A recent editorial in America Magazine entitled The Price of Death reviewed the growing problems with the death penalty and stated, "It is time for the nation to conclude once and for all that in our civilized society there is no place for capital punishment." The national Catholic weekly cited ...
On October 28, 2009, Travis County, Texas, prosecutors moved to dismiss all charges against Michael Scott and Robert Springsteen, who had been convicted in 2001 of the murder of four teens in an Austin yogurt shop in 1991. Springsteen had been sentenced to death and Scott was sentenced to life in ...
A recent editorial from the Aurora Sentinel in Ohio commented on the botched execution of Rommel Bloom. The paper entitled its position as “Time for America to move past capital punishment.” In addition to citing the problems with lethal injection, the paper noted the risk of executing the inno...
The OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), the world's largest regional security organization comprised of 56 States including the U.S., recently published a 2009 Background Paper on The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area. It was prepared by the OSCE's Office of Democratic In...
The Council of the American Law Institute (ALI) recently voted to withdraw a section of its Model Penal Code concerned with capital punishment because of the "current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment." ...
The University of Missouri-Kansas City Law Review recently published a symposium issue of Death Penalty Stories, highlighting the role of the narrative in the defense of death penalty cases...
A growing backlog of death penalty cases and delays in starting trials in Arizona’s Maricopa County has forced Superior Court judges to apply pressure on both sides by refusing to postpone trial dates and demanding that attorneys discuss settlements. ...
Mark White, a former governor of Texas and strong supporter of the death penalty, recently expressed serious reservations about the practice in Texas. "There is a very strong case to be made for a review of our death penalty statutes and even look at the possibility of having life without parole ...
Scott Phillips, a professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Denver, recently published a study that revealed disparities in who receives the death penalty inTexas...
The Death Penalty Information Center has released its latest report, "Smart on Crime: Reconsidering the Death Penalty in a Time of Economic Crisis." The report combines an analysis of the costs of the death penalty with a newly released national poll of police chiefs who put capital punishment at...
