Death Penalty News

In 2015, ABA attorneys noticed a major gap in resources for lawyers who defend capital cases: clemency information. Defendants who have exhausted their direct appeals and habeas petition rights often ask governors for mercy—but there wasn’t a lot of information available about how to do that effectively. “In every state that we studied, there were insignificant resources for and attention paid to clemency, leaving it … too hollow to be comfortable for our profession,” says Misty Thomas, chief counsel for the Death Penalty Due Process Project. Thomas notes that the ABA has no position on the death penalty—but “if we’re going to have the death penalty, every single stage should be robust and meaningful.” Thomas and her colleagues created a resource to make the clemency stage more robust. The Capital Clemency Resource Initiative , a project of the ABA’s Death Penalty Due Process Project, the Death Penalty Representation Project and the Commission on Disability Rights, launched ...

New Online Resource a UVA Law Collaboration The University of Virginia School of Law has collaborated on a new website that uses a data-driven, interactive map to illustrate the rapid decline of the death penalty in the United States since 1991. The website is a supplement to Professor Brandon Garrett’s 2017 book, “ End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice ,” published by Harvard University Press. Previously, there had not been comprehensive, county-level data about persons sentenced to death during the period of 1991-2016. So Garrett worked with a UVA Law librarian and a group of law students, with assistance from undergraduate students in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, to code and check the data of more than 5,000 death sentences. They gathered the information from government records, court rulings and other sources. “This is the first resource to map out modern death sentencing in the United States,” G...