A new report by Rob Warden (pictured), Executive Director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, explores the conditions that led to the end of Illinois's death penalty in 2011. Warden says abolition came about because of a series of fortuitous circumstances, but also because of the work of countless attorneys, academics, journalists and activists who took advantage of these developments. The cavalcade of exonerations from death row, including the high-profile release of Anthony Porter, who was freed through the work of journalism students, underscored the flaws in the death penalty. Police abuse and prosecutorial misconduct caused an erosion of public confidence in the death penalty system. Finally, the report of the Capital Punishment Reform Study Committee, finding that the state could have saved $200 million if it ended the death penalty in 2000, greatly impacted the movement for repeal. Warden noted that what happened in Illinois carried over to other states and said he believes, “The future of the movement [to end the death penalty] hinges on how the arguments that carried the day in Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Connecticut resonate in the thirty-three states where death penalties remain in force but have fallen increasingly into disuse.” The report is published in the Journal of Law and Inequality.
In a forthcoming article in the Washington and Lee Law Review, Ty Alper (pictured), Clinical Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, examines how recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions may affect the ability of defendants to raise claims of ineffective assistance of counsel. Although the right to effective counsel is constitutionally guaranteed, most defendants, especially those charged with non-capital crimes, do not have adequate opportunities during appeals to raise claims of ineffective counsel, in part because such a claim requires the aid of counsel. Alper argues that the recent Supreme Court cases Martinez v. Ryan (2012) and Maples v. Thomas (2012) "portend a legal landscape in which it is possible to obtain a remedy for a Sixth Amendment violation without extending the right to counsel to postconviction cases in their entirety." He concludes that "If...the Court eventually adopts a rule that actually ensures states provide counsel to investigate and raise ineffectiveness claims (as opposed to merely creating tentative incentives for them to do so), capital defendants will benefit from the increased ability to establish cause for procedural default in federal court. But the real sea change will be with respect to the many more noncapital defendants who will be able to surface violations of Gideon in a way that has never before been possible."
A recent article by Professor Aliza Kaplan (pictured) of the Lewis & Clark Law School examines Oregon's death penalty in light of the action take by the state's governor, 
In a new study in Harris County (Houston), Texas, criminologist Scott Phillips found significant racial and gender disparities in the application of the death penalty under former District Attorney Charles Rosenthal. Prof. Phillips of the University of Denver examined homicides from 2001 to 2008 and found that death sentences were imposed on behalf of white victims at 2.5 times the rate one would expect if the system were race neutral. Furthermore, death sentences were imposed on behalf of white-female victims at 5 times the rate one would expect if the system were blind to race and gender. Phillips noted that these disparities were particularly troubling because Rosenthal was forced from office in a scandal involving racial improprieties in the workplace. In a 
Professor Samuel R. Gross (pictured) of the University of Michigan Law School has published an article in the Iowa Law Review examining the historical importance of a series of studies showing racial bias in the death penalty. The issue of race was brought to a head by the Supreme Court's consideration of McCleskey v. Kemp in 1987. McCleskey focused on a statistical examination of Georgia death sentences conducted by David Baldus. Though the study found compelling and statistically significant evidence of racial bias in sentencing, the Court held (5-4) this evidence insufficient to overturn Warren McCleskey's death sentence. Prof. Gross argues that, despite the Court's negative holding, the Justices were convinced that racial bias existed in the death penalty. "Even on the Supreme Court that sent Warren McCleskey to his death, even among the Justices who most strongly support the death penalty, nobody has tried to deny that racial 'sympathies and antipathies' decide who lives and who dies. No Justice said otherwise in McCleskey and none have denied it since." Gross concludes that Baldus' legacy was in "forc[ing] reluctant judges to face up to facts they would have preferred to ignore." Prof. Baldus of the University of Iowa died in 2011.
A recent article by Professors Brian D. Shannon (pictured) of Texas Tech and Victor R. Scarano of the University of Houston examines the ethical implications of forcibly medicating mentally incompetent death-row inmates in order to prepare them for execution. According to the authors, this issue, particulary in Texas, pits "the ethical duties of the medical and legal professions in opposition and casts a shadow over the legitimate and appropriate intentions and professional responsibilities of physicians and lawyers." While the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that mentally incompetent prisoners cannot be executed, only lower courts have ruled on the question of forcing death row inmates to take medication with the purpose of rendering them competent for execution. The article concludes with a legislative recommendation that would solve the ethical dilemma of forcible medication: "[U]pon a determination by the trial court that the defendant is incompetent to be executed (and following any appeal), the court should vacate the death sentence and substitute a life sentence without the possibility of parole," thus allowing psychiatrists to "proceed to treat the symptoms of the inmate’s serious mental illness, without the ethical concern that such treatment could lead to the inmate’s execution."
A recent study by Sherod Thaxton (pictured) of the University of Chicago Law School examined the effect of the threat of the death penalty on plea bargaining. Using statistical analysis of charging and sentencing data in Georgia between 1993 and 2000, Thaxton found that the possibility of a death sentence increased the likelihood of a plea bargain: "deterring two out of every ten death noticed defendants from pursuing a trial." However, the lower number of trials does not offset the high costs of the death penalty, he found. "The empirical findings in this article suggest that the threat of the death penalty has a substantial causal effect on the likelihood that a defendant accepts a plea agreement. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the effect is clearly insufficient to offset the substantial administrative and financial costs arising from the occasional capital defendant taking her chances at trial." In many cases, the author said, significant pre-trial costs are incurred even before a plea agreement is reached. The study, 
The Michigan State Law Review recently dedicated a special issue to the late 