This Fall the Culture Project is hosting a limited engagement of its award-winning production, The Exonerated. The play is a groundbreaking dramatization of the real-life stories of six death row inmates who were freed after being cleared of their capital charge. The production, which premiered a decade ago and traveled the country, is culled from interviews, letters, transcripts, case files, and court records. Former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno described The Exonerated as follows: "What has been done tonight through this play is one of the most extraordinary events I have ever seen and it will do more to promote justice than any literary efforts I have seen. The play will feature a rotating cast of high-profile actors, including Stockard Channing, Brian Dennehy, Steve Earle, John Forté, K’naan, Delroy Lindo, Lyle Lovett, Chris Sarandon, and Brooke Shields. The presentation will also include a series of "Talk-Backs" with leading criminal justice experts, including Christina Swarns, NAACP Legal Defense Fund (October 16), Shari Silberstein, Executive Director of Equal Justice USA (October 24), and Stephen Bright, President, Southern Center for Human Rights (October 31). The Exonerated will run for seven weeks, beginning on September 15, at the Culture Project’s 45 Bleecker Street theater.
George F. Will, conservative commentator of the Washington Post, recently drew a lesson about the death penalty from the documentary The Central Park Five, which airs on PBS on Tuesday, April 16. Will wrote, “[T]his recounting of a multifaceted but, fortunately, not fatal failure of the criminal justice system buttresses the conservative case against the death penalty: Its finality leaves no room for rectifying mistakes.” The Central Park Five tells the story of five juvenile defendants (four African Americans and one Hispanic) who were convicted of the 1989 rape and beating of a jogger in Central Park, New York, despite the absence of DNA evidence linking them to the crime. Four of the five gave confessions, which they later said were the result of police intimidation. All were sentenced to prison. In 2002, after a recommendation from the Manhattan District Attoreny, their convictions were vacated. 
Former Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau has joined two other former prosecutors in filing an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of William Kuenzel, an Alabama death row inmate sentenced to death in 1988. New evidence emerged in 2010 raising doubts about his guilt. According to Morgenthau's brief, two witnesses who testified against Kuenzel gave entirely different accounts that did not identify him when they first met with authorities. One of the witnesses admitted being involved in the murder. Morgenthau, who retired from the D.A.'s office in 2009 at the age of 90, asked Gil Garcetti, former Los Angeles District Attorney, and E. Michael McCann, former District Attorney of Milwaukee, to join him in asking the Supreme Court to hear the case. The three men each served over 30 years as prosecutor, and oversaw a total of more than 7 million cases. Morgenthau said he always opposed the death penalty and felt he had to act in Kuenzel's case because it reminded him of the Central Park Jogger case, in which he helped reverse the convictions of five teenagers originally convicted of rape and attempted murder. Of the death penalty, which was in place in New York from 1995 to 2007, he said, “[W]e reduced murder by 90 percent and never once sought it.”
DPIC is pleased to announce the completion of our 
The U.S. Attorney for Western New York has filed more potential federal death penalty cases than most of his colleagues across the country. Since taking office in March 2010, William J. Hochul, Jr. has petitioned the Justice Department to seek the death penalty against 24 people, more than his counterparts in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Miami or cities in Texas. Only two other federal prosecutors, both from more populous districts than Western New York, have filed as many death cases with Attorney General Eric Holder in the past 2 years. None of Hochul's cases has yet resulted in a capital trial, much less a death sentence, but they have cost taxpayers more than $661,000 just in the past year. This expenditure is more than the combined amount spent by the area's four previous U.S. attorneys on death penalty-eligible cases over the previous 11 years. Kevin McNally, who heads the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project said, "I seriously doubt whether any of [Hochul's] defendants will actually face the death penalty at trial." The Department of Justice spends an estimated $86 million a year on federal death penalty cases. Since the reinstatement of the federal death penalty in 1988, three defendants have been executed. David Kaczynzki, a member of New Yorkers for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said, "I do not see how even the staunchest supporter of the death penalty could argue that these prosecutions are an efficient use of taxpayer money."
In a recent op-ed in the New York Daily News, former New York Governor Mario Cuomo called the death penalty a "serious moral problem" that is "corrosive" to a democratic citizenry. He said many of the problems of the death penalty--ineffectiveness as a deterrent, unfairness, and the risk of executing the innocent--are inevitable: "These imperfections - as well as the horrible and irreversible injustice they can produce - are inevitable. In this country, a defendant is convicted on proof beyond a reasonable doubt - not proof that can be known with absolute certainty. There's no such thing as absolute certainty in our law." He advocated for alternative punishments for murder, particularly life in prison without the possibility of parole: "There is a punishment that is much better than the death penalty: one that juries will not be reluctant to impose; one that is so menacing to a potential killer, that it could actually deter; one that does not require us to be infallible so as to avoid taking an innocent life; and one that does not require us to stoop to the level of the killers." Cuomo mentioned the execution of Troy Davis as an example of the risks posed by the uncertainties in the system. As governor, Cuomo repeatedly vetoed legislation to restore New York's death penalty. Read full op-ed below.