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News Commentary
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- An Intolerable Burden of Proof
An editorial in the New York Times criticized a recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, upholding the heavy burden Georgia places on offenders with intellectual disabilities. In order to be exempt from the death penalty, defendants must prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that they are mentally retarded. (12/12/11, DPIC Update)
- Oregon's Death Penalty Halt Merciful and Right
Kitzhaber is right to say that the capital process is fatally flawed. It is unfair to some defendants, yes. But a system that tries many, condemns some to die and executes few is also cruel and unusual to those who work within the process. It is primarily inflicting pain on victims' relatives who wait in limbo, on jurors who relive those discussions, on prosecutors whose hearts are hardened while their efforts are frustrated and on the budgets and reputations of the states that choose to go on with it anyway.
(11/25/11, CNN.com. News commentary by Mark Osler.)
- Former Head of FBI and Texas Governor Call for Delay in Texas Execution
William Sessions, the former Director of the FBI, and Mark White, former Governor of Texas, called on Texas to delay the November 9 execution of Hank Skinner and allow access to untested DNA evidence. Skinner, who has always maintained his innocence, has repeatedly petitioned for testing of several items from the crime scene that contain DNA.
... Read full op-ed. (11/7/11, DPIC Update)
- The Death Penalty's De Facto Abolition
A new Gallup poll reports that support for the death penalty is at its lowest level since 1972. In fact, though, the decline, from a high of 80 percent in 1994 to 61 percent now, masks both Americans' ambivalence about capital punishment and the country's de facto abolition of the penalty in most places. When Gallup gave people a choice a year ago between sentencing a murderer to death or life without parole, an option in each of the 34 states that have the death penalty, only 49 percent chose capital punishment. That striking difference suggests that more Americans are recognizing that killing a prisoner is not the only way to make sure he is never released, that the death penalty cannot be made to comply with the Constitution and that it is in every way indefensible. But there are other numbers that tell a more compelling story about the national discomfort with executions. ...Opposition to capital punishment has built from the ground up. It is evident in the greater part of America's counties where people realize that, in addition to being barbaric, capricious and prohibitively expensive, the death penalty does not reflect their values. (10/14/11, Editorial by the New York Times)
- Abolish the Death Penalty
Today, Georgia plans to execute an inmate named Marcus Ray Johnson. Later in the month, Alabama plans to execute Christopher T. Johnson, and Texas plans to execute Frank Garcia. Three more people are scheduled to die by the hand of the state next month. More than 3,000 people sit on death row in America, including three in Colorado. ... Since 1973, more than 130 inmates have been released from death row in the United States after they were found to be innocent. There is no way to tell how many people have been executed for crimes they did not commit, but common sense says such miscarriages of justice have surely occurred, and anti-death penalty organizations have documented several almost certain wrongful executions since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter this year granted a posthumous pardon to Joe Arridy, who was executed in Colorado in 1939 but who is now assumed to have been innocent of the murder he was convicted of. ... Capital punishment, of course, raises a moral question, but one does not need to settle it to arrive at the conclusion that it should be abolished. The death penalty is wrong because it doesn't work. (10/10/11, Editorial by the Canon City Daily Record)
- "Minority Practice, Majority's Burden: The Death Penalty Today"
A new report by Professor James S. Liebman (pictured) and Peter Clarke from Columbia University Law School analyzes the declining use of the death penalty and concludes that, although it is abstractly supported by two-thirds of the public, the death penalty is actually practiced by only a distinct minority of jurisdictions in the United States.
(8/29/11, DPIC Update)
- Four With Family Murders Speak About Death Penalty
Kathryn Gaines, Rita Shoulders, Ruth Lowe and Victoria Cox all had someone in their family murdered but all believe that a death sentence for the killers would only deepen their personal wounds. Shoulders lost her sister to murder; Cox lost her brother; Lowe also lost her brother; and Gaines experienced the death of her eldest grandchild a year ago. ... Ruth Lowe said of the man who killed her brother, "I'm learning to forgive. And even if I had the chance I wouldn't want him executed. It would do nothing for me; it would do nothing for the rest of my family. To take his life would make no sense." Kathryn Gaines said, "You cannot bring a life back by taking away another life. It hurts a whole family." The videos of the four women's stories can be found here. The women's stories are also being told in a series of articles in The Record, a Catholic newspaper published in central Kentucky. (8/15/11, DPIC Update)
- The Death Penalty and the Costs of An Obesssion
The unseemly love affair some American politicians have with the death penalty is bad for justice and bad for our country's standing in the world. It inflicts a wholly unnecessary moral stain on a nation that rightly preaches the rule of law to everyone else. (7/14/11, Chicago Tribune. Commentary by E.J. Dionne.)
- DPIC Releases New Report as 35th Anniversary of Reinstatement of the Death Penalty Approaches
The Death Penalty Information Center has released a new report, "Struck by Lightning: The Continuing Arbitrariness of the Death Penalty Thirty-Five Years After Its Reinstatement in 1976." The report shows that despite the changes to sentencing schemes approved by the U.S. Supreme Court on July 2, 1976, race, geography, money and other factors continue to make the implementation of the death penalty arbitrary and unfair. (6/27/11, DPIC Update)
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