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News Commentary

  • Archive of News Commentary
    See all CADP News Commentary links and excerpts from the years 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009.
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  • Retired Prosecutor Says Death Penalty Does Not Serve Families of Homicide Victims
    Dan Glode, a former district attorney in Lincoln County, Oregon, recently criticized the death penalty for "the enormous expense in dollars and emotional capital [it takes] for the families of homicide victims." Writing in the Newport News-Times, he experienced crime both as a prosecutor and as a relative of a murder victim. (7/26/10, DPIC Update)
  • Former Police Investigator Says Law Enforcement Doesn't Need the Death Penalty
    Terrence Dwyer, formerly with the New York Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation, recently chronicled the evolution of his thinking about the death penalty and whether it serves the needs of law enforcement. Dwyer cited several examples of recent exonerations and noted, "Clearly, by keeping the death penalty in place, we run the unacceptable risk of executing the innocent. Those of us in law enforcement do our best to take the guilty off the streets, and more often than not we get it right. But in a world where mistakes are inevitable, the death penalty has no place."
  • Five Myths About the Death Penalty
    Much of what we think we know about American capital punishment comes from the longstanding debate that surrounds the institution. But in making their opposing claims, death-penalty proponents and their abolitionist adversaries perpetrate myths and half-truths that distort the facts. The United States' death penalty is not what its supporters - or its opponents - would have us believe. (7/18/10, The Washington Post)
  • Former New Hampshire Supreme Court Justice Calls for Abolition
    Joseph P. Nadeau, who served on New Hampshire's Supreme Court for six years and as a judge for 37 years, recently testified before the state's death penalty commission about his opposition to the practice. In an op-ed, Judge Nadeau summarized the moral and practical reasons why he believes capital punishment should be repealed. (6/28/10, DPIC Update)
  • Death Row Debacle
    There is something disturbing and distasteful about allowing states to take shortcuts in their quests to put convicts to death. But that is the essence of a deal Congress struck with the states in the mid-1990s. States that guaranteed and paid for a robust system of legal representation for poor death-row inmates could fast-track federal appeals of state capital-punishment convictions. To qualify, a legal defense program had to be certified as acceptable by the federal courts. (6/22/10, Editorial by the Washington Post)
  • Death by Firing Squad Highlights Inhumanity of Death Penalty
    When Ronnie Lee Gardner is strapped into a chair early on Friday morning, and a hood is placed over his head and a small white target is pinned over his heart, the citizens of Utah - and indeed the entire country - will be reminded in the most graphic of fashions of the nation's ongoing adherence to the barbaric, arbitrary and bankrupting practice of capital punishment. (6/17/10, ACLU Blog of Rights)
  • The Spectacle Doesn't Change the Facts
    So it is no small wonder that the death penalty is increasingly falling into disuse. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty less often, and jurors are returning death sentences less often as well. The active use of the death penalty is confined to a handful of states. Even in Utah, despite this splashy appearance on the executing stage, executions are very rare, with less than a dozen people on death row. (6/17/10, The Huffington Post)
  • Debate: Death Penalty Only Hurts Victims' Families
    Reallocating wasted dollars and attention from the death penalty to mental health resources would meet the real needs of murder victims' family members. Gardner's high-profile execution is an opportunity for the country to rethink the death penalty. Let's put murderers in prison and turn our attention and resources to the real needs of murder victims' family members. (6/17/10, AOL News)
  • Racial Discrimination in Jury Selection Continues in Death Penalty Cases
    A recent study published by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit human rights and legal services organization in Alabama, shows that the practice of excluding blacks and other racial minorities from juries remains widespread and largely unchecked, especially in the South. (6/7/10, DPIC Update)
  • Murder Victim's Family Helps Case Settle with Life Sentence
    A desire for revenge, an eye for an eye, would have been entirely understandable. Somehow, the Carsons managed to resist it in the name of their daughter. For their courage in even facing this day, they deserve the admiration of all. Their daughter was a very special person. The same may be said of those who raised her. (5/26/10, Editorial by the Charlotte News & Observer)
  • The Echoes of an Execution Reverberate Loud and Clear
    A real-life story told in "Willie McGee and the Traveling Electric Chair" a half-hour documentary to be broadcast Friday on NPR. ... For nearly 15 years, beginning in 1940, Mississippi used a "traveling electric chair" that moved from county to county to execute prisoners convicted of capital crimes. What is perhaps most unusual about the McGee case, though, is not the portable electric chair or even the public nature of the execution, but the live radio coverage that accompanied it, which was recorded and is excerpted in Mr. Richman's documentary. (5/5/10, New York Times)
  • American Bar Association Publishes "The State of Criminal Justice 2010"
    Ultimately, our society must decide whether to continue with a system that has been found in study after study to be far more expensive than the actual alternative – in which life without parole is the most serious punishment. The question has become substantially more important given the severe economic downturn in 2008-10. In view of the lack of persuasive evidence of societal benefits from capital punishment, this is one ineffectual, wasteful government program whose elimination deserves serious consideration. (5/3/10, DPIC Update)
  • Death Penalty "Neither Just Nor Moral"
    More than a decade has passed since the state of Utah executed a convicted murderer. Now, as the state prepares to once again apply the death penalty, is a good time for Utahns and their elected leaders to consider abandoning this archaic and deeply flawed form of punishment. In the interim between the execution of Joseph Mitchell Parsons in 1999 and the expected setting of a death date for Ronnie Lee Gardner, the legal, moral and ethical arguments supporting capital punishment in Utah have been eroding like sand castles at high tide. That is because the state-sponsored killing of a human being, no matter how heinous the crime, is permitted by a system that has been proven beyond doubt to be inherently capricious, unfair and shockingly fallible. And, one by one, state legislatures across the country are deciding that they can no longer justify, even for merely financial reasons, retaining the death penalty as their supreme form of punishment. Already, 15 states have dropped the death penalty and some dozen others have looked at following suit. Lifetime imprisonment under severe restrictions, arguably worse than death, has become the preferred alternative. (4/17/10, Editorial by the Salt Lake Tribune)
  • Capital Punishment Leaves US on Wrong Side of History
    The United States of America, proud of its commitment to fairness and justice, is being left behind on one of the most important international human rights issues of our age. We are way behind the curve. Surpassed in human rights by, most recently, Togo and Burundi. The US has a worse record on the essential human right to life than Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Liberia, Mexico and Rwanda. And those are only a few of the nations that have left us in the dust, just in this century so far. In 2009, only 18 nations on the planet executed human beings. This great nation is in that small, shameful community. To be precise, we placed at number five, behind Saudi Arabia, but with more state killing of people than Yemen, Sudan, Viet Nam and Syria. China executed more than all other nations combined last year, but they're just the leader of a club we should not be proud to belong to. (4/16/10, The Jurist)
  • Death Penalty Hurts - Not Helps - Victims' Families
    Kathleen Garcia, a victims' advocate and expert on traumatic grief, recently shared her opinions on the death penalty in New Hampshire, a state that is studying the issue through its Commission on Capital Punishment. Garcia, a member of New Jersey's Death Penalty Study Commission, wrote, "Make no mistake - I am a conservative, a victims’ advocate and a death penalty supporter. But my real life experience has taught me that as long as the death penalty is on the books in any form, it will continue to harm survivors. For that reason alone, it must be ended." Garcia suffered through the murder of a family member in 1984, but has found the death penalty to be much more harmul than helpful: "It is my opinion, as well as the view of other long-standing victim advocates throughout New Jersey, that our capital punishment system harmed the survivors of murder victims. It may have been put in place to serve us, but in fact it was a colossal failure for the many families I serve." (4/5/10, DPIC Update)
  • Death Row's Elimination Would Save Money
    A recent editorial in the Spokane (WA) Spokesman-Review called for elimination of the death penalty in light of its high costs and the state's tight budget. (3/22/10, DPIC Update)
  • Challenging the Constitutionality of the Federal Death Penalty
    A recent article in the Akron Law Review asks whether the Federal Death Penalty Act (FDPA) is in compliance with the Sixth Amendment's right to confront witnesses because it allows hearsay evidence in determining whether a defendant is eligible for the death penalty. ... Allowing the government to prove statutory aggravating factors … with testimonial hearsay, even where the defendant has never had an opportunity to cross-examine the declarant(s), is not constitutional." (3/22/10, DPIC Update)
  • Caution Urged on Death Penalty Expansion
    John Whitehead, president of the conservative Rutherford Institute, recently voiced concerns in the Huffington Post about expanding the death penalty in Virginia. He noted, "As capital punishment studies have shown, whether or not you are sentenced to death often has little to do with the crime committed and everything to do with your race, where you live, and who prosecutes your case." (3/1/10, DPIC Update)
  • MSNBC Reports on Costs of Death Penalty
    View the online video. (2/22/10, CADP)
  • Resources on the Death Penalty for Communities of Faith
    The Death Penalty Information Center has recently updated its information packet entitled "Death Penalty Resources for Communities of Faith." This packet was initially developed to help a wide spectrum of religious groups address the death penalty by providing information, discussion questions, and multi-media resources. (2/8/10, DPIC Update)
  • Conservative Leaders Call for End to Death Penalty
    Roy Brown, state senator and 2008 Republican nominee for governor of Montana, said that opposition to capital punishment aligns well with his conservative ideology. He is reaching out to social and fiscal conservatives, hoping to create a bipartisan movement against capital punishment. Brown noted, "I believe that life is precious from the womb to a natural death." He continued, "Criminals should be prosecuted. I want it to be life without parole. In the long run, that's much cheaper." (2/1/10, DPIC Update)
  • A Decade of Progress on Death Penalty Justice
    A recent editorial in the Dallas Morning News recalled that the paper had reversed its position in support of the death penalty in April 2007. ... "These are all signs that courts, prosecutors, politicians and the public are recognizing the problems in our imperfect system of justice," the editorial states. "This newspaper feels more strongly than ever that those flaws are sufficiently widespread that the justice system cannot be trusted to impose irreversible sentences of death." (1/25/10, DPIC Update)
  • Death Penalty System Irretrievably Broken
    A recent editorial in the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina cited the American Law Institute's decision in 2009 to separate itself from the death penalty system as another reason for the state to abolish the practice. The ALI, whose model death penatly standards were instrumental in the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to allow the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976, has recently disavowed its own recommendations because the many problems of the system had rendered it unworkable. The editorial also cited a recently published study by Duke University Professor Philip Cook that concluded North Carolina could save $11 million annually over the costs of life imprisonment if it abolished the death penalty. (1/18/10, DPIC Update)
  • Kill the Death Penalty
    The editor of the editorial page of the Palm Beach Post recently called for an end to the death penalty in Florida. Citing DPIC's recent report on the costs of the death penalty, Randy Schultz notes that, "Every objective study shows that life imprisonment costs much less than sentencing someone to death." (1/11/10, DPIC Update)
  • Denial of Death: Time to End Capital Punishment
    An editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune recently called for an end to capital punishment, stating that "the legal, moral and practical arguments against capital punishment have evolved from sound to unassailable" since the punishment was reinstated over 30 years ago. (1/11/10, DPIC Update)
  • Researchers Find "No Empirical Support" for Deterrence Theory
    Researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas recently published a study on whether executions deter homicides using state panel date and employing well-known econometric procedures for panel analysis. The authors found "no empirical support for the argument that the existence or application of the death penalty deters prospective offenders from committing homicide." (1/4/10, DPIC Update)






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