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In the past several years, there has been a marked change in the climate with regard to public discourse about the death penalty in the United States. This is partly due to advances in DNA technology. This Article, in Part II, will address the impact that DNA testing has had on public discourse on capital punishment. In Part III, it will discuss the overall context in which public discourse has changed, and its likely impact on judges, prosecutors and governors dealing with capital cases. Finally, in Part IV, it will consider the broader implications of this change in climate, in leading to a moratorium on executions in Illinois, consideration of moratoria elsewhere, and potentially to abolition of capital punishment in this country.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Moratorium ,

This article explores how, capital punishment in the United States is a minority practice. This feature of American capital punishment has become more pronounced recently, and is especially clear when death sentences, which are merely infrequent, are distinguished from executions, which are exceedingly rare.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Minorities,

Almost everyone agrees that indigent defense in America is underfunded, but workable solutions have been hard to come by. For the most part, courts have been unwilling to inject themselves into legislative budget decisions. And, when courts have become involved and issued favorable decisions, the benefits have been only temporary because once the pressure of litigation disappears so does a legislature’s desire to appropriate more funding. This Article proposes that if an indigent defense system is under-funded, the state supreme court should impose a default rule raising the standard of proof to “beyond all doubt” to convict indigent defendants. The legislature would then have the opportunity to opt out of this higher standard of proof by providing enough funding to bring defense lawyers’ caseloads within well-recognized standards or by providing funding parity with prosecutors’ offices. Such an approach will create an incentive for legislatures to adequately fund indigent defense without miring courts in detailed supervision of legislative budget decisions. At the same time, because courts can check once per year to determine whether there is funding parity with prosecutors’ offices or compliance with caseload guidelines, there will be constant pressure on legislatures to maintain adequate funding in order to avoid the higher standard of proof.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

Forty-three years after the Supreme Court reversed course and reinstated the death penalty, reliable data on the individuals sent to death row is maddeningly difficult to obtain. The Intercept set out to compile a comprehensive dataset on everyone sentenced to die in active death penalty jurisdictions since 1976. The findings show that capital punishment remains as “arbitrary and capricious” as ever.

• Document type International law - Regional body
• Themes list Statistics, Country/Regional profiles,

This article explores why women are rarely executed and examines the execution of four women in the Post-Furman Era, focusing on the execution of Karla Faye Tucker. The execution of Karla Faye Tucker in 1998, the second of the four women to be executed, occured in hte midst of relentless publicity. The Tucker execution revived interest in gender equity in the administration of capital punishment.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Women,

For the first time in a long time, the Supreme Court’s most important death penalty decisions all have gone the defendant’s way. Is the Court’s new found willingness to protect capital defendants here to stay? Or is it a passing fancy that will dissipate in less hospitable times? At first glance, history allows for optimism. Furman v. Georgia, the 1972 landmark that invalidated the death penalty, provides a seemingly perfect example of the Court’s ability and inclination to protect capital defendants when no one else will. Furman looks countermajoritarian, scholars have claimed it was countermajoritarian, and even the Justices saw themselves as playing a heroic, countermajoritarian role in the case. But the lessons of Furman are not what they seem. Rather than proving the Supreme Court’s ability to withstand majoritarian influences, Furman teaches the opposite – that even in its more countermajoritarian moments, the Court never strays far from dominant public opinion, tending instead to reflect the social and political movements of its time. This Article examines the historical context of Furman v. Georgia and its 1976 counterpart, Gregg v. Georgia, to highlight a fundamental flaw in the Supreme Court’s role as protector of minority rights: its inherently limited inclination and ability to render countermajoritarian change. In theory, the Court might protect unpopular minorities, but in practice it is unlikely to do so unless a substantial (and growing) segment of society supports that protection. Even then, Furman reminds us that the Court’s “help” may do more harm than good. If the past truly is a prologue, Furman portends that the Court’s current interest in restricting the death penalty will not last forever. Like the fair-weather friend, the Court’s protection will likely be there in good times but gone when needed the most.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

This article provides a brief history of the study of miscarriages of justice in America. It analyzes the field of wrongful conviction scholarship as three distinct genres: the big-picture studies, the specialized-causes literature, and the true-crime genre. It also analyzes what these literatures have contributed to knowledge about miscarriages as well as their limitations. This article attempts to rethink the study of miscarriages of justice to systematically develop a more sophisticated, insightful, and generalizable criminology of wrongful conviction.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Innocence,

In this article, the authors examine how the debate over women’s executions during the nineteenth and early twentieth century funneled and in various ways processed the contrary demands of gender and capital justice. They show how encounters with capital punishment both reflected and reinforced dominant interpretations of womanhood and as such contributed to the intricate web of normative strictures that affected all women at the time. At the same time, however, the often heated debates that accompanied such cases pried open some of the contradictions inherent in the dominant interpretations and, as a result, came to challenge the boundaries that separated not only women from men but also women from each other. Rather than viewing gender as a unidirectional influence on capital punishment, the authors argue that gender is best approached as an evolving social category that gets reconstructed, modified, and transformed whenever it is implicated in social practices and public debates.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Women,

On May 16, 2001, the federal government carried out its first execution for a criminal offense in over 38 years (Timothy McVeigh). This article (part of a symposium issue) examines recent developments in the administration of the federal death penalty, in the legislative, judicial, and executive (Department of Justice) arenas. While not an abolitionist, the author expresses misgivings about federal capital punishment as it is currently administered, updating statistics regarding racial and geographic disparity from his 1999 article “The Federal Death Penalty: History and Some Thoughts About the Department of Justice’s Role,”. The article also explains “What the Supreme Court Got Wrong in Jones,” (1999). Finally, the international implications of the first execution by the federal government in two generations are explored. No longer can the United States shift its internationally isolated position regarding capital punishment onto its constituent states under a theory of independent federalism. Note: This is a description of the paper and not the actual abstract.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

The landscape of the American death penalty is diverse. Though death penalty attitudes show a remarkable and increasing degree of homogeneity by region, race, gender, religion, and other factors, the actual practice of the death penalty varies substantially from region to region, and even from state to state. While these variations are widely recognized, they are not widely studied or understood. The lack of attention paid to the actual practice of the death penalty in different states and regions, the patterns that contribute to its use, and the factors associated with these patterns represents a substantial and troubling gap in our knowledge of an issue as widely studied as the death penalty.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

Cruel and unusual punishment, as prohibited by the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution, encompasses punishment that amounts to torture and barbarity, cruel and degrading punishment not known to the common law, and punishment so disproportionate to the offense as to shock the moral sense of the community. Thus, contained in the Eighth Amendment is a fundamental respect for humanity. For the imposition of a death sentence, the trier is constitutionally mandated to take into account the character and record of the individual offender and the circumstances of the particular offense. What constitutes cruel and unusual punishment?

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment and Punishment, Electrocution,

The story focuses on Tessie Hutchinson, who was selected by the communal lottery for execution; her only sin was to live in a village that had the tradition of stoning one of its inhabitants each year. This paper suggests some ways that the life of America’s death penalty mirrors the art of “The Lottery.” The author comments on the “masking of evil,” the execution of the innocent, the arbitrariness in selecting those who die, the search for justification, and the brutality of the death penalty. In “The Lottery,” the tradition of the stoning was so embedded in tradition and its administration was so formal and precise that the ultimate outcome of the tradition, the killing of a fellow human being, was sanitized and unexamined. In America, the net effect of the bureaucratization of executions is to give those who implement them and those who receive reports of them a sense of sterility and mundaneness that should never accompany the state’s killing of its own. Although proponents of capital punishment in America argue that the chances that an innocent person will be executed are slim, history shows that it has occurred. It was no comfort to Tessie Hutchinson that she was to be the only member of her village to be stoned that year. So it is no comfort to the innocent who are executed that each is only one of a small number of innocent people who have been killed by the state. The arbitrariness of the lottery in selecting who will be executed may not be so obvious in the selection of those who will be killed by the state in America. Still, random and arbitrary circumstances impact who is selected to be executed, circumstances such as the race and wealth of the defendant, the race of the victim, the quality of the defense counsel, the particular trial judge, and the State in which the crime occurs. Although there is no unequivocal evidence that the death penalty achieves some monumentally positive benefit for American society, support for it by the community persists, along with its brutality and cruelty. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that a “thinly veiled cruelty keeps the custom alive.”

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

Drawing on in-depth interviews with the relatives of convicted murderers, this article interrogates the concept of stigma through an everyday notion of familial toxicity and commonsense understandings of murder. Identifying moments of stigmatizing strain, the article examines moments of opportunity for managing stigma through three metatactics: management of space, information, and self-presentation. However, due to the problems in carrying out sensitive research with a hidden population, there are limits to how far arguments made can be generalized. Therefore, the article concludes by raising questions for future research.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Murder Victims' Families,

This Article aims to provide an examination: An analysis of the state procedures that prisoners may employ after trial to litigate innocence claims grounded on newly discovered non-DNA evidence. Ultimately, the result of this examination is far from sanguine. Little-altered in decades beyond the trend toward recognizing the benefits of DNA testing, the structure of most state procedures means that a prisoner’s quest for justice may turn on the fortuity that a biological sample was left at the crime scene and preserved over time. The fact that DNA testing provides a modicum of certainty to an innocence claim does not imply that claims lacking the possibility of such certainty are spurious; on the contrary, DNA has unearthed holes in the criminal justice system, holes that are likely also prevalent in cases without biological evidence.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Innocence, Networks,

Since July 1978, when Maryland’s capital punishment statute took effect, the State has been plagued by charges that the imposition of the death penalty is influenced by the race of the defendant and the legal jurisdiction in which the homicide occurred. Most critics use the characteristics of condemned inmates on Maryland’s death row, which reveal possible racial motivations. However, the authors argue that simply relying on the characteristics of condemned inmates reveals little about the underlying mechanisms of the imposition of the death penalty. The recent history of capital punishment in Maryland is reviewed, followed by a brief description of the legal structure of capital punishment under Maryland law. In order to empirically measure whether the imposition of capital punishment in Maryland is discriminatory, the authors examined 1,311 death eligible cases in Maryland from July 1, 1978 to December 31, 1999. Death eligible cases were defined as those cases in which the State’s attorney filed a notice of intention to seek a death sentence, the facts established that first degree murder was committed, the defendant was the principle in the first degree murder, the murder included at least one statutory aggravating circumstance, and the defendant was eligible for capital punishment at the time of the offense. The statistical strategy focused on determining the influence of race of victim, race of defendant, and geography on the imposition of the death penalty. Findings suggest that race and geography indeed play an important role in the Maryland justice system. Race and geography exert their most influence at the death notification and death notice retraction stages of the process. Thus, it is prosecutorial discretion that is the most apparent in the possible discriminatory application of capital punishment in Maryland. The findings from this study are unsurprising and are in line with similar studies from other States. The author cautions that overt racism is not necessarily the reason beyond the disproportionate application of capital punishment.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

Based on the review of capital cases from various jurisdictions involoving issues of competence to stand trial, this article examines the standards, literature, and varying practices associated with competence assessments and adjudications. The author, who is an experienced criminal defense lawyer with capital trial and postconviction litigation experiece, examines the implications of disparities in the approaches and definitions used in dealing with competence assessments and suggests solutions to improve the standards of practice related to these important assessments.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

In this Article, I will review the matrix in which executive decisions in women’s capital clemency cases are made, a matrix supplied by modern equal protection law, the nature and scope of the clemency power, gender politics, and contemporary death row. I will then conduct two thought experiments. Each invented case tests the relevance of gender in legally and politically acceptable contemporary clemency decisions. The goal is to understand the politics and law of granting or denying that very rare boon-commutation of sentence – to a female death row prisoner. The exercise offers support for two conclusions. In the age of formal equality, women cannot be granted clemency simply because they are women. The rhetoric of chivalry is untenable for the contemporary executive. A governor who is courageous and rhetorically skillful, however, can sometimes successfully defend the commutation of the death sentence of a woman as a proper use of the power to grant mercy, done for her sake, the class she exemplifies, the conscience of the governor, and the public.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Women, Clemency,

Capital Punishment and the Bible goes beyond proof-text arguments to examine biblical statements about capital punishment in their historical contexts and for present meaning. Does the use of capital punishment in the USA meet Old Testament standards for fairness? How did Jesus and the early church extend God’s love in restorative justice? Gardner C. Hanks convincingly shows that the use of the death penalty is not consistent with Jesus’ call for love and forgiveness.

• Document type Book
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Religion ,

The news about the astounding accuracy of felony convictions in the United States, delivered by Justice Scalia and Joshua Marquis in the passage set out epigrammatically above, would be cause for rejoicing if it were true. Imagine. Only 27 factually wrong felony convictions out of every 100,000! Unfortunately, it is not true, as the empirical data analyzed in this article demonstrates. To a great extent, those who believe that our criminal justice system rarely convicts the factually innocent and those who believe such miscarriages are rife have generally talked past each other for want of any empirically-justified factual innocence wrongful conviction rate. This article remedies at least a part of this problem by establishing the first such empirically justified wrongful conviction rate ever for a significant universe of real world serious crimes: capital rape-murders in the 1980’s. Using DNA exonerations for capital rape-murders from 1982 through 1989 as a numerator, and a 406-member sample of the 2235 capital sentences imposed during this period, this article shows that 21.45%, or around 479 of those, were cases of capital rape murder. Data supplied by the Innocence Project of Cardozo Law School and newly developed for this article show that only 67% of those cases would be expected to yield usable DNA for analysis. Combining these figures and dividing the numerator by the resulting denominator, a minimum factually wrongful conviction rate for capital rape-murder in the 1980’s emerges: 3.3%. The article goes on to consider the likely ceiling accompanying this 3.3% floor, arriving at a slightly softer number for the maximum factual error rate of around 5%. The article then goes on to analyze the implications of a factual error rate of 3.3%-5% for both those who currently claim errors are extremely rare, and those who claim they are extremely common. Extension of the 3.3%-5% to other capital and non-capital categories of crime is discussed, and standards of moral duty to support system reform in the light of such error rates is considered at length.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

If statistics are any indication, the system may well be allowing some innocent defendants to be executed.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Innocence,

This article presents a legal and political analysis of the 2003 – 2005 effort of Governor Mitt Romney to make the death penalty available as a sentencing option in Massachusetts.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Public debate,

This Article analyzes the factors that influence the decisions of South Carolina prosecutors to seek the death penalty. Professor Unah and Mr. Songer employ statistical methods to examine the legal and nonlegal factors that shape this decision-making process. Controlling for political factors, this Article finds that the race of the victim, gender, and rural crime locations are significant considerations in the decision to seek the death penalty. Further, Professor Unah and Mr. Songer argue that these nonlegal factors undermine the legal guidelines that are intended to channel and steer the decision-making process. This Article highlights the arbitrary nature of the decisions that result from these considerations, and it concludes by challenging the legitimacy of a process influenced by these factors.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

For the past seven years, Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh have quietly financed investigations to help free Jason Baldwin, Jesse Misskelley Jr., and Damien Echols, known as the the West Memphis Three, who were wrongly convicted in 1994 of murdering three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis , Arkansas. This piece provides and in-depth look into Peter and Fran’s involvement with the investigattion, the creation of ‘West of Memphis’ as a way to expose key developments in the infamous murder case and Jackson’s main goal, to exonerate the West Memphis Three and help find the real killer.

• Document type Academic report
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Innocence,

After its national release in October, “Incendiary: The Willingham Case” is now available on DVD and through Apple’s iTunes Movie Store.The film examines the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham in Texas for the murder of his children by arson and centers around evolving standards of scientific evidence and the notion that an innocent man was executed

• Document type Legal Representation
• Themes list Innocence,

The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) of 1996 was drafted, enacted, and signed in an atmosphere of anger and fear. The legislation, which includes substantial cutbacks in the federal habeas corpus remedy, was Congress’s response to the tragedy of the Oklahoma City bombing. During the congressional hearings on the bills that culminated in AEDPA, the proponents of the legislation claimed that its habeas corpus restrictions and other provisions were necessary to fight domestic terrorism. The Senate bill was approved by the House on April 18, 1996, the day before the one-year anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. President Bill Clinton invoked the bombing in a statement he issued at the time of the Senate’s passage of the legislation and again when he signed the legislation into law. Even at the time of the debates, some courageous legislators were willing to denounce the fallacious connection that the bill’s proponents drew between the bombing and the broader issues of the scope and availability of habeas corpus review. Many of the habeas corpus restrictions ultimately built into AEDPA had been under consideration by Congress since 1990, though none had been adopted. The congressional proponents of these restrictions seized upon the Oklahoma City tragedy as a means of accomplishing their longstanding goal to scale back federal habeas corpus review.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

As our society’s enduring marriage to the death penalty prepares to enter yet another century, it is a marriage that places the children in danger. Why is it that we continue to impose the death penalty for crimes committed by juvenile offenders? As questionable as the death penalty is in general, might we not at least place an “adults only” label on it? The rest of the world has already done so. Only in America need children fear execution by their own government.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Juveniles,

Authors David Johnson, an expert on law and society in Asia, and Franklin Zimring, a senior authority on capital punishment, utilize their research to identify the critical factors affecting the future of the death penalty in Asia. They found that when an authoritarian state experienced democratic reform, such as in Taiwan and South Korea, the rate of executions dropped sharply. Johnson and Zimring also found that politics, instead of culture or tradition, is the major obstacle to the end of capital punishment in Asia.

• Document type Book
• Countries list China

Chivalry – that set of values and code of conduct for the medieval knightly class – has long influenced American law, from Supreme Court decisions to substantive criminal law doctrines and the administration of criminal justice. The chivalrous knight was enjoined to seek honor and defend it through violence and, in a society which enforced strict gender roles, to show gallantry toward “ladies” of the same class, except for the women of the knight’s own household, over whom he exercised complete authority. This article explores, for the first time, whether these chivalric values might explain sentencing outcomes in capital cases. The data for the article comes from our original study of 1299 first degree murder cases in California, whose death penalty scheme accords prosecutors and juries virtually unlimited discretion in making the death-selection decision. We examine sentencing outcomes for three particular types of murder where a “chivalry effect” might be expected – gang murders, rape murders and domestic violence murders. In cases involving single victims, the results were striking. In gang murders, the death sentence rate was less than one-tenth the overall death sentence rate. By contrast, in rape murder cases, the death sentence rate was nine times the overall death sentence rate. The death sentence rate for single-victim domestic violence murders was roughly 25% lower than the overall death sentence rate. We also examined, through this study and earlier California studies, more general data on gender disparities in death sentencing and found substantial gender-of-defendant and gender-of-victim disparities. Women guilty of capital murder are far less likely than men to be sentenced to death, and defendants who kill women are far more likely to be sentenced to death than defendants who kill men. We argue that all of these findings are consistent with chivalric norms, and we conclude that, in the prosecutors’ decisions to seek death and juries’ decisions to impose it, chivalry appears to be alive and well.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Women,

In general, Muslim nations recognize the validity of the death penalty, and many frequently impose it. According to Amnesty International, between 1985 and mid-1988, Saudi Arabia executed 140 prisoners for the crimes of murder, robbery with violence, drug smuggling or distribution, and adultery. During the same period, Pakistan executed 115, primarily for the crime of murder. Hundreds every year faced the firing squad in Iraq for murder, desertion, treason, sabotage, and economic corruption. At the same time, the Islamic Republic of Iran executed more than 743 inmates for murder, drug crimes, political offenses, prostitution, adultery and other “moral offenses,” including “being corrupt on earth” and “being at enmity with God.” In face of the widespread acceptance of the death penalty within the Muslim world, this essay explores the contours of an Islamic argument against capital punishment. The argument is not, and cannot be, an appeal for the abolition of the death penalty in all circumstances. It does call into question, however, the legitimacy – indeed, the legality in accordance with the principles of classical Islamic law, or the Shari’ah – of capital punishment as it is practiced in the era of Islamization.

• Document type Article
• Countries list Iran (Islamic Republic of)
• Themes list Religion , Capital offences, Most Serious Crimes,

The Miranda conundrum runs something like this: If the Miranda decision represents true constitutional interpretation, and all unwarned statements taken during custodial interrogation are compelled” within the meaning of the self-incrimination clause, the impeachment and “”fruits”” exceptions to Miranda should fall. If it is not true constitutional interpretation, than the Court has no business reversing state criminal convictions for its violation. I offer here what I hope is a satisfying answer to this conundrum, on both descriptive and normative levels, that justifies not only Miranda but a host of similar Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist Court decisions as well. In Part I, I introduce and define the terms “”constitutional prophylactic rule,”” “”constitutional safe harbor rule,”” and “”constitutional incidental right,”” and attempt to legitimate their use. I further demonstrate that constitutional criminal procedure is so flush with such prophylactic and safe harbor rules and incidental rights that trying to eliminate them now, by either reversing a large number of criminal procedure cases or “”constitutionalizing”” all of those holdings, would do more harm than good. I propose that we accept the fact that these rules and rights are a fixed part of our constitutional landscape, and focus instead on minimizing their risks and maximizing their benefits”

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Fair Trial,

This Article addresses the issue of whether a criminal defendant may waive the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments by selecting an unconstitutional punishment over a constitutional punishment. The Article begins with a discussion of the Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, followed by a discussion of areas where the Court has allowed defendants to waive Eighth Amendment protections in various contexts. Then, the Article discusses court decisions that have addressed whether one may waive Eighth Amendment protections by choosing a cruel and unusual punishment. Generally, this issue has arisen in three contexts: (1) where defendants are given the punishment option of banishment; (2) where sex offenders are given the punishment option of castration; and (3) where capital defendants are given an execution method option that violates the constitution. The Article explains that at least in the context of punishment type, a defendant’s choice should not waive Eighth Amendment protections. First, the ban on cruel and unusual punishments is a right that differs significantly from other constitutional criminal rights because it serves a broad societal purpose. Second, the waiver of this right differs from the waiver of other criminal rights because such waivers do not benefit the individual or society. Finally, to allow such waivers would strip the Eighth Amendment of meaning by permitting legislatures to create any punishment options it desired. Therefore, the Article concludes that the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishments cannot be waived by an individual.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment and Punishment,

My assignment is to try to give an overview of the status of the death penalty in America at the beginning of the twenty-first century. I will try to put that in the context of how the death penalty was viewed thirty years ago, or more, and maybe that will tell us something about how the death penalty will be viewed thirty or forty years from now.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Public opinion, Public debate,

English version starts at 15 minutes and 59 seconds. ‘Words beyond death row’, extracts from testimonies of death row prisoners illustrated by a photo screening, in partnership with PhotoEspaña. This movie was presented during the 5th World Congress against the death penalty in Madrid in June 2013, by Ensemble contre la peine de mort – ECPM (Together against the death penalty) #Abolition201

• Document type Multimedia content
• Themes list Death Row Conditions, Death Penalty,
• Available languages Des mots par-delà le couloir

In this paper we use reported exonerations as a window on false convictions generally. We can’t come close to estimating the number of false convictions that occur in the United States, but the accumulating mass of exonerations gives us a glimpse of what we’re missing. We located 340 individual exonerations from 1989 through 2003, not counting at least 135 innocent defendants in at least two mass exonerations, and not counting more than 70 defendants convicted in a series of childcare sex abuse prosecutions, most of whom were probably innocent. Almost all the individual exonerations that we know about are clustered in the two most serious common felonies: rape and murder. They are surrounded by widening circles of categories of cases that include false convictions that are rarely detected, if ever: rape convictions that have not been reexamined with DNA evidence; robberies, for which DNA identification is useless; murder cases that are ignored because the defendants were not sentenced to death; assault and drug convictions that are forgotten entirely; misdemeanor convictions that aren’t even part of the picture. Judging from our data, any plausible guess at the total number of miscarriages of justice in America in the last fifteen years must run to the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, in felony cases alone. We can, however, see some clear patterns in those false convictions that have come to light.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Innocence,

While most western democracies have renounced the death penalty, capital punishment enjoys vast and growing support in the United States. A significant and vocal minority, however, continues to oppose it. Against Capital Punishment is the first full account of anti-death penalty activism in America during the years since the ten-year moratorium on executions ended.

• Document type Book
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Trend Towards Abolition,

In this book Beth Berkowitz tells the story of modern scholarship on the ancient rabbinic death penalty and continues the story by offering a fresh perspective using the approaches of ritual studies, cultural criticism, and talmudic source criticism. Against the scholarly consensus, Berkowitz argues that the rabbinic laws of the death penalty were used by the early Rabbis in their efforts to establish themselves in the wake of the destruction of the Temple. The purpose of the laws, she contends, was to create a complex ritual of execution that was controlled by the Rabbis, thus bolstering their claims to authority in the context of Roman imperial domination.

• Document type Book
• Themes list Religion ,

This book addresses one of the most controversial issues in the criminal justice system today—the death penalty. Paternoster et al. present a balanced perspective that focuses on both the arguments for and against capital punishment. Coverage draws on legal, historical, philosophical, economic, sociological, and religious points of view.

• Document type Book
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Due Process , Public opinion, Country/Regional profiles,

Forensic mental health assessments in death penalty cases are on the rise due in part to the continuing growth of forensic psychology and psychiatry as professions, combined with several recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions. Forensic mental health professionals are now conducting assessments at every stage of death penalty proceedings, ranging from pre-trial evaluations to determine eligibility for the death penalty to evaluations conducted post-sentencing and closer to the date of execution.

• Document type Book
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Mental Illness, Intellectual Disability,

This book provides an introduction to socio-legal forms of mitigation in capital sentencing. It helps mitigation specialists, defense investigators, social scientists, and lawyers in developing socio-cultural themes of mitigation. It examines scientific formulations, concepts, and frameworks for structuring social history investigations and assessments of moral culpability. A fundamental aim of this handbook was to provide mitigation professionals not only with an understanding of the context of mitigation in criminal justice thinking, but also ways of contextualizing issues of blame and culpability.

• Document type Book
• Themes list Due Process ,

This book shows that the majority of Asian countries have been particularly resistant to the abolitionist movement and tardy in accepting their responsibility to uphold the safeguards. The essays contained in this volume provide an in-depth analysis of changes in the scope and application of the death penalty in Asia with a focus on China, India, Japan, and Singapore. They explain the extent to which these nations still fail to accept capital punishment as a human rights issue, identify impediments to reform, and explore the prospects that Asian countries will eventually embrace the goal of worldwide abolition of capital punishment.

• Document type Book
• Themes list Trend Towards Abolition, Death Penalty, Country/Regional profiles,

Imprisoned by the Past: Warren McCleskey and the American Death Penalty examines the long history of the American death penalty and its connection to the case of Warren McCleskey, revealing how that case marked a turning point for the history of the death penalty. In this book, Jeffrey L. Kirchmeier explores one of the most important Supreme Court cases in history, a case that raised important questions about race and punishment, and ultimately changed the way we understand the death penalty today.

• Document type Book
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Fair Trial,

This article addresses the effect of judge versus jury decision making through analysis of a database of all capital sentencing phase hearing trials in the state of Delaware from 1977-2007. Over the three decades of the study, Delaware shifted responsibility for death penalty sentencing from the jury to the judge. Currently, Delaware is one of the handful of states that gives the judge the final decision making authority in capital trials. Controlling for a number of legally-relevant and other predictor variables, we find that the shift to judge sentencing significantly increased the number of death sentences. Statutory aggravating factors, stranger homicides, and the victim’s gender also increased the likelihood of a death sentence, as did the county of the homicide. We reflect on the implications of these results for debates about the constitutionality of judge sentencing in capital cases.

• Document type Academic report
• Themes list Statistics, Country/Regional profiles,

This report provides evidence on public attitudes to the death penalty in Ghana, withan empirical focus on Accra.

• Document type Academic report
• Themes list Public opinion, Statistics,

In the first part of this paper we address the problems inherent in studying wrongful convictions: our pervasive ignorance and the extreme difficulty of obtaining the data that we need to answer even basic questions. The main reason that we know so little about false convictions is that, by definition, they are hidden from view. As a result, it is nearly impossible to gather reliable data on the characteristics or even the frequency of false convictions. In addition, we have very limited data on criminal investigations and prosecutions in general, so even if we could somehow obtain data on cases of wrongful conviction, we would have inadequate data on true convictions to compare them to. In the second part we dispel some of that ignorance by considering data on false convictions in a small but important subset of criminal cases about which we have unusually detailed information: death sentences. From 1973 on we know basic facts about all defendants who were sentenced to death in the United States, and we know which of them were exonerated. From these data we estimate that the frequency of wrongful death sentences in the United States is at least 2.3%. In addition, we compare post-1973 capital exonerations in the United States to a random sample of cases of defendants who were sentenced in the same time period and ultimately executed. Based on these comparisons we present a handful of findings on features of the investigations of capital cases, and on background facts about capital defendants, that are modest predictors of false convictions.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Innocence,

Capital punishment has once again become the focus of intense national debate in the United States. There is increasingly widespread public concern over the propriety of state-sanctioned executions and the legal processes by which they are accomplished. Even in political arenas, where little more than a decade ago commentators could quip that “the electric chair has replaced the American flag as your all-purpose campaign symbol,” many elected officials are voicing second thoughts about capital punishment. The American Bar Association (ABA), among other prestigious groups, has called for a moratorium on executions until, at least, the procedural flaws in the legal process through which death sentencing takes place — what the ABA analysts characterized as a “haphazard maze of unfair practices” — have been identified and remedied. Recent assessments of the scope and seriousness of the problems that plague this process suggest that the task of reforming the system of capital punishment will prove to be a daunting one. For example, James Liebman and his colleagues have presented a sobering picture of what they termed a “broken system” in which the outcomes of capital trials — if judged by their fates in the appellate courts — are legally wrong more often than they are right. And at least one judge declared the federal death penalty unconstitutional because it failed to provide sufficient procedural protections to capital defendants.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Public opinion, Public debate,

Chiou Ho-shun, a death row inmate in Taiwan, may be executed at any time. He said, ‘ I hope you can save me, but if it’s too late, please scatter my ashes in the Longfeng harbour, and buy a meatball, come and see me.’

• Document type Legal Representation
• Themes list Torture,

The ritual slaughter of humans for sacrificial purposes has an ancient provenance. Few members of modern society would be inclined to believe that killing humans for sacrificial purposes continues. Of those, most probably envision it only being practiced by individuals who belong to “uncivilized,” or non-“First-World” cultures. Upon closer scrutiny, however, it becomes apparent that this is a misconception because the past and present practice of capital punishment includes a thinly disguised manifestation of the ritualized killing of people, otherwise known as human sacrifice. The purpose of this article is to identify, describe, and analyze the historic and contemporary connection between the practices of capital punishment and human sacrifice. After describing how human sacrifice constitutes an integral component of capital punishment, it will be argued that the institutionalization of this antiquated barbaric ritual, vis-a-vis the use of capital punishment, renders the present use of the death penalty in the United States incompatible with “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society”; and that consequently, this facet of capital punishment renders the penalty at odds with the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against the infliction of “cruel and unusual” punishments.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment and Punishment,

A vast literature details the crimes that condemned inmates commit, but very little is known about the social histories of these capital offenders. For example, how many offenders possessed mitigating characteristics that demonstrate intellectual or psychological deficits comparable to those shared by classes of offenders categorically excluded from capital punishment? Did these executed offenders suffer from intellectual disability, youthfulness, mental illness, or childhood trauma? The problem with this state of affairs is that the personal characteristics of the defendant can render the death penalty an excessive punishment regardless of the characteristics of the crime. This Article begins to fill the mitigation knowledge gap by describing the social histories of the last hundred offenders executed in America. Scouring state and federal court records, this Article documents the presence of significant mitigation evidence for eighty-seven percent of executed offenders. Though only a first step, our findings suggest the failure of the Supreme Court’s mitigation project to ensure the only offenders subjected to a death sentence are those with “a consciousness materially more depraved” than that of the typical murderer. Indeed, the inverse appears to be true: the vast majority of executed offenders possess significant functional deficits that rival — and perhaps outpace — those associated with intellectual impairment and juvenile status; defendants that the Court has categorically excluded from death eligibility.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Mental Illness, Arbitrariness, Intellectual Disability,

The issue of erroneous convictions in capital cases has recently gained considerable nationwide media attention. This article builds on prior research by examining 76 cases of inmates who were released from death rows between 1970 and 1998 because of doubts about their guilt. By using sources, or persons who have extensive insider knowledge about these cases, as well as published court opinions, it was possible to identify the causes of the wrongful convictions as well as the significant events that led to the discovery of the miscarriages of justice. The data indicate that prosecutorial misconduct, perjury of witnesses, police misconduct, and racial discrimination were influential factors that led to the wrongful convictions. In addition, continued investigation by the defense attorney, new witnesses coming forward, and/or a confession from another person were the factors most often leading to the discovery of errors. These findings suggest that there have not been any significant changes in causes of erroneous convictions since the implementation of contemporary safeguards. As a result, policy changes are suggested to decrease the chances of erroneous executions.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Innocence,

This study is a quantitative analysis designed to compare two groups of factually innocent capital defendants: Those who were exonerated and those who were executed. There are a total of 97 cases in the sample, including 81 exonerations and 16 executions. The primary objective of the authors is to identify factors that may predict case outcomes among capital defendants with strong claims of factual innocence. Through the use of a logistic regression model, the following variables were significant predictors of case outcome (exoneration vs. execution): allegations of perjury, multiple types of evidence, prior felony record, type of attorney at trial, and race of the defendant. These results point toward significant problems with the administration of capital punishment deriving primarily from the quality of the case record created at trial.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Innocence,

Prior research on the role of race in wrongful capital convictions has focused primarily on the race of the defendant. In contrast, this article begins with two case studies that illustrate the impact of the race of the defendant and also the race of the victim in contributing to erroneous convictions. The second section of this article identifies the race of the defendant and the victim in 82 cases where prisoners were released from death row because of doubts about their guilt and in a matched group of inmates who were executed. Through the use of three logistic regression models, the combination of the race of the defendant and the race of the victim is identified as a significant predictor of case outcome (exoneration vs. execution). The results also indicate that an indirect relationship may exist between the combination of the race of the defendant and the victim, the strength of the evidence, and case outcome.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Innocence, Discrimination,

The purpose of this paper is to offer a critique and commentary on the European agenda on the abolition of the death penalty, and in so doing the author has relied heavily on the contributions made by a number of commentators to the recent Council of Europe publication, “The Death Penalty: Abolition in Europe”.

• Document type Article
• Themes list International law, Trend Towards Abolition,

This article reviews the extent to which the movement to abolish capital punishment has been successful and discusses some of the influences which have produced a remarkable increase in the number of abolitionist countries in the past two decades. It asks whether this trend has now come to an end as many countries which retain the death penalty continue to defy, for a variety of reasons, international pressure to change their laws and practices. Finally, it discusses some actions that might prove effective in overcoming these obstacles.

• Document type Article
• Themes list Trend Towards Abolition, Death Penalty,

The ABA’s revised Guidelines have squarely addressed the importance of seeking and negotiating dispositions in capital cases as a core component of effective representation in matters of life and death. Pleas have been available in the overwhelming majority of capital cases in the post-Furman era, including the cases of hundreds of prisoners who have been executed. There are no precise empirical data on this question. Plea negotiations are typically confidential, with both parties maintaining a posture of plausible denial if negotiations fail. The prosecutor may find it harder to argue to jurors that justice in a particular case requires a sentence of death if they know that he had offered the defendant a life sentence only weeks before. Defense counsel may not want to advertise her willingness to plead to first-degree murder if the case proceeds to trial and she is arguing to the jurors that the proof supports only second-degree. In addition, there are cases where a plea was acceptable to both sides, but negotiation never began because each side waited for the other to initiate discussions.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Legal Representation,

Professor Kirchmeier examines the recent decline in support for the death penalty in the United States and the resulting emergence of a movement to impose a moratorium on executions. After discussing the history of the death penalty abolition movement in the United States, he identifies five major and seven minor events that have contributed to the growth of the Death Penalty Moratorium Movement. Then, he compares the current Moratorium Movement to other similar reform periods: the 1960s Death Penalty Abolitionist Movement; legislative abolition of the death penalty in several states during the mid-1800s and early 1900s; death penalty abolition in other countries; and the Anti-Lynching Movement of the early 1900s. Based on the history of these other movements, Professor Kirchmeier discovers various lessons for today’s Moratorium Movement, including lessons about strategy and the roles of public opinion and leadership. Finally, using these lessons from history and looking at recent events, he considers the future of the Moratorium Movement. Professor Kirchmeier concludes that for the Movement to continue to be successful: (1) there must be no major national distracting forces; (2) the Movement must continue to broaden its arguments and not be overly dependent upon one issue, one person, or one strategy; (3) the Movement must continue seek support from unexpected voices; and (4) the Movement must stay focused on the goals of achieving popular support and creating new leaders. Finally, Professor Kirchmeier predicts that the Moratorium Movement is strong enough to continue to have lasting effects.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Moratorium ,

Danthong Breen, from the NGO Union for Liberty, based in Thailande, explains why the death penalty is torture.

• Document type Academic report
• Countries list Thailand
• Themes list Torture,
• Available languages Danthong Breen - Union pour les libertés

This video was filmed at the 4th World Congress Against the Death Penalty in Geneva in February 2010. Speaker is Elizabeth Zitrin at the opening session.

• Document type Arguments against the death penalty
• Themes list Networks,
• Available languages Les vidéos du 4ème congrès mondial

The ‘Garret Study’ analyses the first 200 post conviction DNA exonerations in the United States. This article wheights the impact of the study and how it will depend on how jurists, politicians, and scholars extrapolate the explanatory power of the data.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Innocence,

This article draws on two original empirical research projects that explored judges’ opinions on the retention and administration of capital punishment in India and Bangladesh. The data expose justice systems marred by corruption, incompetence, abuses of due process, and arbitrary and inconsistent treatment of defendants from arrest through to conviction and sentencing. It shows that those with the power to sentence to death have little faith in the integrity of the criminal process. Yet, a startling paradox emerges from these studies; despite personal knowledge of its flaws, judges have trust in the death penalty to deter crime and to realise other sentencing aims and feel retention benefits society. This is explained by reference to utilitarian values. Not only did our judges express strongly utilitarian justifications for sentencing people to death, in terms of their erroneous belief in its deterrent effect, but some also articulated utilitarian justifications for misconduct in pre-trial processes, suggesting that it was necessary to break the rules to secure convictions when the system was dysfunctional and ineffective.

• Document type Article
• Countries list Bangladesh
• Themes list Arbitrariness, Death Penalty,

A survey on Singaporeans’ opinion on the death penalty, which was led by Assoc Prof Chan Wing Cheong from the NUS Faculty of Law, found that most Singaporeans are in favour of the death penalty but less so for certain cases. Fewer support the death penalty for drug trafficking and firearms in cases where no one dies or is injured and there is also less support for the mandatory death penalty. The survey polled 1,500 Singapore citizens aged 18 to 74 between April and May 2016.For a free summary of the study: http://news.nus.edu.sg/highlights/11231-death-penalty-support-not-clear-cut

• Document type Article
• Countries list Singapore
• Themes list Public opinion, Public debate, World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, Death Penalty, Statistics, Country/Regional profiles,

The racial dimensions of the death penalty are well-documented. Many observers assume this state of affairs derives from bias—often implicit and occasionally explicit—against black defendants in particular. Research points to an even more alarming factor. The race of the victim, not the defendant, steers cases in the direction of death. Regardless of the perpetrator’s race, those who kill whites are more likely to face capital charges, receive a death sentence, and die by execution than those who murder blacks. This short Essay adds a contemporary gloss to the race-of-victim effect literature, placing it in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement and showing how it relates to the broader, systemic devaluation of African-American lives.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Discrimination,

We examine sources of variation in possession and use of the death penalty using data drawn from 193 nations in order to test theories of punishment. We find the death penalty to be rooted in a country’s legal and political systems, and to be influenced by its religious traditions. A country’s level of economic development, its educational attainment, and its religious composition shape its political institutions and practices, indirectly affecting its use of the death penalty. The article concludes by discussing likely future trends.

• Document type Article
• Themes list Networks,

Scott Panetti was accused of killing his parents in law and convicted. Scott suffered from severe mental illness for many years, Schizophrenia. He dismissed his legal counsel and represented himself at trial wearing a cow boy suit and asking irrelavent questions. This video tells the story of Scott Panetti’s case and questions whether he was mentally stable to attend trial and represent himself.

• Document type Legal Representation
• Themes list Networks,

Although the death penalty has a long history, it is not without debate and differing views. There appears to be a gap between Whites and Blacks in terms of their support of capital punishment. Students at a Midwestern university were surveyed to determine whether there were differences between the two groups of students in reasons to support or oppose the death penalty. In bivariate tests, there were significant differences between White and Black students on 15 of 16 measures for reasons for supporting or opposing capital punishment. These differences continued for 10 of the 16 measures even after multivariate analysis controlled for the effects of gender, age, and academic level. The results are discussed.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Public opinion, Public debate,

This is an essay about capital punishment and American culture. Its point of departure is the recent publication of several books and articles suggesting that the USA’s retention of the death penalty is an expansion of an underlying cultural tradition that creats an elective affinity between American society and the execution of criminal offenders. The implicit – and sometimes explicit claim – of this new literature is that today’s capital punishment system is an insurance of ‘American exceptionalism’, an expression of a deep and abiding condition that has shaped the American nation from its formative years to the present.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

This article reports the results of a two-part investigation of psychological assessments proposed as expert evidence in legal context.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Mental Illness, Death Penalty,

This docu-series investigate the fallibility of the death penalty in the United States.

• Document type Multimedia content
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Death Penalty,

Em decorrência de certos crimes de grande repercussão que abalam a sociedade e da impotência do Estado frente à criminalidade, ressuscitam vozes e projetos solicitando a aplicação da pena de morte entre nós. O tema é de abordagem complexa, polêmica e controversa.Os partidários da supressão do homem sustentam que a presença da pena de morte na legislação teria por escopo de definitivamente banir ou diminuir o crescente índice de criminalidade em nosso país, além de desestimular homicídios, latrocínios, crimes sexuais violentos, seqüestros etc.Mas será que a pena de morte, como têm sido defendido por alguns setores da sociedade, seria a solução para os problemas de violência e da criminalidade, que estão sendo vivenciadas pela população brasileira?

• Document type Article
• Countries list Brazil
• Themes list Networks,

The Flynn Effect is a well documented phenomenon demonstrating score increases on IQ measures over time that average about 0.3 points per year. Normative adjustments to scores derived from IQ measures normed more than a year or so prior to the time of testing an individual have become controversial in several settings but especially so in matters of death penalty litigation. Here we make the argument that if the Flynn Effect is real, then a Flynn Correction should be applied to obtained IQs in order to obtain the most accurate estimate of IQ possible. To fail to provide the most accurate estimate possible in matters that are truly life and death decisions seems wholly indefensible.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Networks,

One of the largely unique aspects of the American jury system is that it confers upon the parties the unilateral power – in the form of peremptory challenges – to remove prospective jurors for any non-racial or non-gender-based reason. This article presents an overview of the literature on peremptory challenges, and an empirical analysis of their use in Philadelphia capital cases in the 1980s and 1990s.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Fair Trial,

As noted by Flanagan (1996), public opinion polls about crime and justice can act as a social barometer providing important data to policy makers regarding what the public is willing, or is not willing, to accept when it comes to proposed legislation and/or intervention programming. This paper reports findings from the 2001 Penn State Poll, a random telephone survey of Pennsylvanians, 18 years of age or older, in which citizens were asked about their attitudes toward and perceptions of such issues as fear of crime, capital punishment, the most important goal of prison, and where they would most like to see their tax dollars spent (building more prisons vs. early intervention programs with troubled youth). Significant differences were found within certain demographic groups across these sets of questions, and in a predictive model, gender, race/ethnicity, and education had a greater impact on citizens’ support for capital punishment than did their fear of crime. Overall, findings suggest that the public is not as punitive as it is sometimes believed to be by legislators and policy makers.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Public opinion,

There is a lack of research on attitudes toward capital punishment in China, and there is even less research on cross-national comparisons of capital punishment views. Using data recently collected from college students in the United States and China, this study finds that U.S. and Chinese students have differences in their views on the death penalty and its functions of deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitation. This study also reveals that the respondents’ perspectives of deterrence, rehabilitation, retribution, and incapacitation all affect their attitudes toward the death penalty in the United States, whereas only the first three views affect attitudes toward capital punishment in China. Furthermore, retribution is the strongest predictor in the United States, whereas deterrence is the strongest predictor in China.

• Document type Article
• Countries list China
• Themes list Public opinion, Public debate,

The death penalty is a subject that, in the words of Justice Adrian Saunders of the Eastern Caribbean Court of Appeal, “invariably elicits passionate comment.” Such comment is particularly so within the states that make up the Commonwealth Caribbean, where rising rates of violent crime have led to strong public clamor for a swift and final response. The involvement of foreign courts and quasi-judicial international tribunals in limiting the actual use of the death penalty in the Caribbean has made the issue even more politically charged, leading to a strongly held perception that the judgments of these foreign bodies are unacceptable challenges to the very exercise of Caribbean national sovereignty.

• Document type Article
• Themes list Mandatory Death Penalty,

Para completar e reforçar as disposições da carta Africana dos direitos humanos e dos povos,o artigo 66 da carta autoriza a adopção de protocolos ou acordos particulares. É com estefundamento que a Comissão Africana dos Direitos Humanos e dos Povos (CADHP) – organismoda União Africana (UA) encarregado da promoção e protecção dos direitos humanos em Africa– propôs à UA a adopção de um protocolo específico sobre a abolição da pena de morte queprecisa que “o direito à vida é o fundamento de todos os outros direitos”, e que “a abolição dapena de morte é essencial à protecção eficaz” deste direito.

• Document type Academic report
• Themes list Country/Regional profiles,
• Available languages Leaflet on the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Abolition of the Death PenaltyBrochure sur le Protocole additionnel à la Charte africaine des droits de l’homme et des peuples portant sur l’abolition de la peine de mort en Afrique

• Document type Book
• Themes list Death Penalty,

This report details the administration of the death penalty in Taiwan. It discusses Taiwans obligations under international law, how executions are carried out, the profile of the condemned, discrimination in the sysem and discusses placing a moratorium on executions in Taiwan.

• Document type NGO report
• Themes list Networks,
• Available languages 重啓死刑執行 廢死之路大倒退- 2010台灣死刑報告

The issue of whether innocent people have been executed is now at the center of the debate concerning the legitimacy of capital punishment. The purpose of this research was to use data collected by the Gallup Organization in 2003 to investigate whether Americans who believed that an innocent person had been executed were less likely to support capital punishment. We also explored whether the association varied by race, given that African Americans are disproportionately affected by the death penalty. Our results indicated that three-quarters of Americans believed that an innocent person had been executed for a crime they did not commit within the last five years and that this belief was associated with lower levels of support for capital punishment, especially among those who thought this sanction was applied unfairly. In addition, our analyses revealed that believing an innocent person had been executed had a stronger association with altering African American than white support for the death penalty.A key claim of death penalty advocates is that a high proportion of the public supports capital punishment. In this context, scholars opposing this sanction have understood the importance of showing that the public’s support for executing offenders is contingent and shallower than portrayed by typical opinion polls. The current research joins this effort by arguing that the prospect of executing innocents potentially impacts public support for the death penalty and, in the least, creates ideological space for a reconsideration of the legitimacy of capital punishment.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
• Themes list Innocence,