In response to news coverage of the 133 death row inmates who have been exonerated and spared execution, death penalty proponents make the argument (pdf) that the list of exonerated inmates is overly inclusive because it includes inmates whose convictions were reversed but whose actual innocence was never conclusively established.

Dan Rodricks at the Baltimore Sun contacted the Death Penalty Information Center, which keeps track of the exoneration count, to ask for a response to that criticism. The DPIC explained what it means to be "exonerated" and therefore included in the count:

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The inaptly named California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (what rehabilitation would that be?) was forced to propose new lethal injection procedures and to seek public comment upon them for a 60 day period that ended June 30.

By the end of the 60 days, more than 7,000 people had submitted comments to CDCR. Nearly all objected to implementing the regulations. Many called on the CDCR to disclose the costs of carrying out executions, something the CDCR has refused to do even though disclosing the costs is required by law.

On Tuesday, CDCR held a public hearing on the proposed rules. More than one hundred people attended; only two supported the resumption of California's death penalty. [more ...]

As promised, Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell of Connecticut vetoed a bill that would have abolished the state's death penalty. While Rell privately agrees that capital punishment is not a deterrent, her veto message stressed the need to send a "clear message to those who may contemplate such cold, calculated crimes." Tough on crime posturing again triumphs over sound policy.

Is anyone else troubled by the notion that an arsonist has been sentenced to death because firefighters died trying to protect property from the fire he set?

Raymond Lee Oyler set a number of fires (perhaps as many as 25) in and around Riverside County, California in the summer and fall of 2006. On October 26, he started a fire at the base of the San Jacinto Mountains that spread rapidly up the hillsides. Five firefighters from a U.S. Forest Service firefighting crew were engulfed in and killed by "a wall of flames" while trying to save an unoccupied house in a canyon.

Oyler's five murder convictions may be reasonable on the theory that he should have anticipated his actions could cause deaths. But death is not an inevitable consequence of arson, and the prosecution admitted that Oyler did not start the fires with the intent to kill firefighters (or anyone else). A compulsion to set fires isn't the moral equivalent of a compulsion to kill. Oyler's death sentence is unwarranted.

Connecticut's Republican Gov. Jodi Rell promised to veto a bill that would eliminate capital punishment as a sentencing option. Overriding the veto would require a two-thirds majority vote in both legislative chambers. Since the state senate passed the bill by a 19-17 vote, an override is unlikely.

Rell says the veto is for the families of victims who believe there are crimes "so fundamentally revolting to our humanity" as to warrant death. What about the family members who believe that the death penalty is fundamentally revolting to human values? And given the haphazard application of the death penalty, does Rell seriously believe that only the worst offenders who commit the worst crimes will be executed?

Many Iraqis are unhappy that Steven Green will not be executed for the atrocities he committed in Iraq, including the rape of a teenage girl and the murder of her family. A Sunni leader considers the sentence "insulting for Iraq's honor" while a leader of the family's tribe said:

“This is a tribal issue, and we cannot accept any moderate sentence except death. His life is the only cost that we will accept.”

If execution is the only "moderate sentence" the tribe will accept, one wonders what a harsh sentence might look like. Killing Green's family, raping his children, and burning down his house? A belief in eye-for-an-eye punishment or revenge is the reason Americans most frequently cite for their support of the death penalty. While it isn't surprising to hear similar views expressed in Iraq, particularly with regard to Green's horrific crimes, killing for vengeance or honor is not justice. [more ...]

Today is Amnesty International's Global Day of Action. More than 100 protests are planned. Among them is one in Georgia for death row inmate Troy Davis, who has a compelling case for innocence.

Amnesty asks you watch the video and forward it on to a friend.

During the last three decades, whenever tough-on-crime conservatives would read stories about an execution delayed for years by legal challenges, we would hear their familiar complaints about frivolous appeals and abuses of the writ and how litigious inmates waste everybody's time when they should just get on with dying. Sometimes the complaints motivated tough-on-fairness laws that limited an inmate's opportunity to seek review of a conviction or sentence.

In tough economic times, voters are learning a fiscal truth: tough-on-crime policies are tough on budgets. These days, when a newspaper reports that California may spend $5 million more to keep inmate Michael Ray Burgener on death row than it would have spent if he'd been sentenced to life without parole, the tired rhetoric of tough-on-crimers is less relevant to voters than the budgetary impact of being smart-on-crime. Even in states that are less dysfunctional than California, a death sentence costs up to $2 million more than a life sentence. That's one reason why three states have repealed the death penalty in the last five years, and why calls to replace it with a less costly alternative are increasingly heard in other states.

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By a vote of 18 to 17, the Colorado Senate today rejected a bill to end the death penalty and use the savings to investigate cold cases.

Four Democrats, Mary Hodge of Brighton, Jim Isgar of Hesperus, John Morse of Colorado Springs, and Lois Tochtrop of Thornton, voted with the Republicans to defeat the bill.

Gov. Bill Ritter would not state his position on the bill before the vote. Afterwards, he said "he thought the death penalty should not have been tied to funding cold cases."

Today was the last day for the Senate to act. Hopefully, a similar bill will come up again next year.

District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro doesn't get it.

District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro said Friday that his office isn't giving up on the death penalty, even after two capital trials this year ended in mistrials and a nightmarish child-murder case this month failed to persuade a jury to hand down the ultimate penalty.

Cannizzaro and his staff believe Louisiana should kill the "worst of the worst," like Barry Ferguson, who raped and strangled his mentally disabled daughter. Who, they asked, could be more deserving of the death penalty? Last week, Cannizzaro got his answer.

The jury of eight men and four women, unpersuaded, sentenced Ferguson to life in prison.

Voters elected Cannizzaro to represent their community in court. Juries are delivering the sense of the community again and again: killing is not the answer to killing. Orleans Parish juries haven't returned a death sentence in twelve years, despite New Orleans' reputation as the nation's murder capital. But Cannizzaro doesn't get it. He refuses to hear the message that juries continue to deliver, and so he spends the community's resources in futile efforts to kill defendants. It's time that Cannizzaro learned to listen.

Colorado is a major step closer to eliminating the death penalty. The bill to repeal it and use the savings on solving cold cases passed the House by a single vote today. It now goes to the Senate.

The last death penalty case in Colorado cost $1.4 million to prosecute. It costs about $70,000 for a non-capital murder case.

The Public Defender's capital unit in Chicago has requested a judge dismiss a death penalty case because they are out of funds. Without money to retain expert witnesses for their client who has serious mental issues and is facing the death penalty for a double homicide, they can't provide an adequate defense and comply with the Sixth Amendment's requirement of a fair trial.

Cost is becoming as much an argument against the death penalty as wrongful convictions. New Jersey lawmakers cited the financial burden as one reason for their decision to abolish capital punishment in 2007, and other states are wrestling with similar legislation.

Placek's motion is the first of its kind for the public defender's office but probably not the last, said Assistant Public Defender Julie Harmon, the office's capital case coordinator. But she denied it's a new legal tactic to remove the threat of the death penalty for clients.

The office is currently representing 120 clients facing the death penalty: [More...]