A new book by Professor John D. Bessler, titled Cruel and Unusual: The American Death Penalty and the Founders’ Eighth Amendment, challenges the conventional wisdom that the country's founders were avid death penalty supporters, and explores their various views on capital punishment. Prof. Bessler discusses how the indiscriminate use of executions gave way to a more enlightened approach that has been evolving ever since. He sheds new light on the Constitution’s “cruel and unusual punishments” clause by exploring the early influence of Cesare Beccaria’s essay, On Crimes and Punishments. Bessler examines the Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment case law and concludes that the death penalty may well be declared unconstitutional in time. Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, called the book, “A searing indictment of capital punishment, this pioneering history of the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause is destined to reframe America’s death penalty debate. As a definitive account of the Eighth Amendment’s origins and the Founding Fathers’ own ambivalent views on executions, it will forever change our perceptions of cruelty and penal reform in the founding era." 
Edwin Turner (pictured), a death row inmate in Mississippi, is scheduled for execution on February 8. His attorney, Jim Craig, has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court and Governor Phil Bryant for a reprieve, based in part on Turner's mental illness. Craig said, “The Supreme Court has not decided the question of whether a prisoner with a severe mental disorder or disability which significantly impairs that person’s ability to rationally process information, to make reasonable judgments and to control their impulses, whether people in that category can be executed. So we’re asking the Supreme Court to establish that it would be contrary to consensus of moral values, that it would be cruel and unusual punishment, to execute someone with severe mental illness.” Turner is facing execution for the 1995 shooting of a clerk and a customer at a gas station. His accomplice received a sentence of life without parole after pleading guilty to murder. Turner has a long family history of mental illness: his great-grandmother and grandmother were committed to state hospitals. Turner’s mother attempted suicide twice, and his father was killed in an explosion that some believe was a suicide. Turner has also attempted suicide several times, including one instance that left his face permanently disfigured. UPDATE: Execution stayed for psychiatric testing.
Roger Hood (pictured), Professor Emeritus of Criminology at the University of Oxford, has published a report on official attitudes towards capital punishment in China. Abolition of the Death Penalty: China in World Perspective outlines the changes over the past decade on this issue within Chinese academic and judicial communities. Hood observed that one of the strongest justifications for the death penalty in China is “the belief that retribution based on the notion of ‘a life for a life’ was deeply embedded in Chinese culture; that ignoring this support might cause social instability; and that China [is] not yet sufficiently economically developed that it could do away with an effective criminal sanction.” Nevertheless, Hood points out that despite secrecy around the country’s death penalty, “no one can doubt that a movement towards restriction and eventual abolition has got under way.” He attributes the shift in attitudes on the death penalty to the emerging international narrative that suggests capital punishment should be treated not as “a weapon of national criminal justice policy,” but as “a fundamental violation of universal human rights: not only the right to life but the right to be free from excessive, repressive and tortuous punishments - including the risk that an innocent or undeserving person may be executed.”
A new video produced by the American Civil Liberties Union features three North Carolina citizens who believe they were excluded from serving on juries in capital cases because of their race. The video was released in conjunction with the first court challenge brought under North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act. The defendant, Marcus Robinson, is asking his death sentence be commuted to life without parole because potential African-American jurors were struck from his jury at a rate 3.5 times higher than other potential jurors. Laverne Keys (pictured), who was excluded from a capital jury in 1999, believes she was removed because of her race: “It made me feel like I was back in 1960, that racism is still very much alive. It makes you wonder whether all these people are being given a fair trial or given a fair consequence so far as the death penalty,” she said in the video. Denny LeBoeuf, Director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project, said, “The stories presented in this video make clear that the death penalty system in North Carolina and across the nation is plagued by discrimination. The Racial Justice Act is a crucial means of ensuring that no one is wrongfully executed because of racial bias.” 
A recent editorial in Nebraska's Journal Star urged support for a bill to replace the death penalty with a sentence of life in prison. Among the reasons cited for its position was the risk of executing an innocent person. The editorial noted that advancements in DNA testing have shown the fallibility of the current system: “Seventeen people who were on death row have been set free after DNA testing proved they were wrongly convicted.” The editorial also pointed to more than 250 convictions that have been overturned nationwide because of DNA testing, including the Nebraska defendants known as the "Beatrice Six," who were wrongfully convicted of rape and murder but later exonerated through DNA testing. The paper cautioned against supporting the death penalty on the basis of one horrific case: “[E]ven if the system worked without flaw in that particular case, there can be no guarantee that it will work that way every time. And if the system cannot work without error - as the facts show - then the death penalty cannot be justified. Sooner or later, an innocent person will die at the hands of the state of Nebraska." Read full editorial below.
Tyrone Noling (pictured) is an inmate on Ohio’s death row whose guilt has been called into doubt by a lack of physical evidence, recanting witnesses and refusal by the state to conduct a DNA test. Andrew Cohen, writing in a recent issue of The Atlantic, compared Noling's case to that of Troy Davis, who was executed in Georgia in 2011, despite doubts about his guilt. Noling was convicted of the 1990 murders of an elderly couple in their home. Initially, there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime, and no witnesses against him. When an aggressive investigator took over the case, some witnesses began giving statements against Noling. Cohen reports that all of these witnesses have since recanted their statements, claiming they were pressured by the prosecutor. In 2009, 13 years after the original trial, prosecutors provided defense attorneys with handwritten police notes from the investigations in 1990 in which a witness identified another man as having committed the murders. The state is currently refusing DNA testing of evidence collected from the crime scene that might place this man at the scene of the crime.From DPIC
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More Resources A list of special resources on the death penalty from DPIC.
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©2012 Death Penalty Information Center
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More Resources A list of special resources on the death penalty from DPIC.
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