Joseph P. Nadeau, who served on New Hampshire's Supreme Court for six years and as a judge for 37 years, recently testified before the state's death penalty commission about his opposition to the practice. In an op-ed, Judge Nadeau summarized the moral and practical reasons why he believes capital punishment should be repealed. "Our thinking evolves, as people, technology, and societies progress," he said. "And what is acceptable at one time in our history may become unwelcome at another. So we are encouraged to re-examine our core principles and to consider whether death continues to be an acceptable punishment in New Hampshire." He dismissed the notion that the death penalty is needed to honor law enforcement officers: "Its abolition does not dishonor those who serve in law enforcement because honor comes from personal pride and earned respect, not from the ability of the state to execute a human being."
Judge Nadeau continued, "No legal system is perfect. Human beings make mistakes. That is one reason we accept the notion that occasionally the guilty will go free and the innocent will be convicted. But I do not believe anyone accepts the notion that it is all right for a person to be wrongfully executed. So with the most respected judicial system in the world, how can we willingly embrace a sentence which cannot be reversed after it is imposed; and how can we continue to believe that it is morally acceptable for the state to take a human life?" Read full op-ed below.
Amnesty International recently released its annual report on international abuses and progress in the field of human rights: "The State of the World's Human Rights." The report covers January to December 2009 and addresses human rights issues in every country around the world. The report also highlights countries' involvement in international and regional human rights treaties. Among the nations in the Americas, the United States had the most active death penalty practices with over 100 new death sentences and 52 executions. Although death sentences were handed down in the Bahamas, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago, no executions were carried out. The majority of North American and South American countries are abolitionist in law or in practice.
Texas Judge Paul C. Murphy recently ordered prosecutors to hand over key evidence from a 1989 murder case to the 
On June 14, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Albert Holland, who lost his right to file a federal appeal of his death sentence when his lawyer missed the 1-year deadline established under the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA). The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled that Holland's attorney's conduct in missing the deadline was not egregious enough to warrant setting aside the imposed deadline. The appeals court said that the attorney would have had to act with "bad faith, dishonesty, divided loyalty, or mental impairment" to be excused from the imposed deadline, and that gross negligence was not enough of a reason. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed the appeals court's decision, saying that its standard was too rigid. The Court said, "We have previously held that a garden variety claim of excusable neglect, such as simple miscalculation that leads a lawyer to miss a filing deadline, does not warrant [an exemption from the deadline]. But this case before us does not involve, and we are not considering, a garden variety claim of attorney negligence. Rather, the facts of this case present far more serious instances of attorney misconduct." Holland's lawyer failed to communicate with him for several years, despite letters from Holland asking information regarding his appeals. Holland also contacted state courts and the Florida Bar Association in an effort to have the lawyer removed from the case. 