News Tip: Lifting Moratorium Won’t Sway Public Opinion On Death Penalty, Law Experts Say

Attorney General William P. Barr said Thursday that the federal government will resume executions of death-row inmates, ending a moratorium in place for 16 years.

• Quotes:
  “Attorney General Barr’s decision to resume the federal death penalty is just one more effort by the administration to pick off low-hanging fruit that gives its political base a sense that something is happening," says Duke University law professor James E. Coleman Jr. “Like the president’s heated rhetoric, however, it is just thunder signifying nothing. The public is rapidly losing faith in the death penalty. This move will not change that trend.”
   
• “However dramatic it may sound, the announcement that federal executions will resume certainly does not mean that we should expect to see them any time soon,” says Duke University law professor Brandon L. Garrett. “First, lawyers will challenge the execution protocol; indeed there is already pending federal litigation. Second, jurors are increasingly rejecting death sentences in federal cases and in the states. The federal death penalty has continued to decline, and although Attorneys General have tried to revive it over the years, they have not succeeded.”
   
• Bios:
  James E. Coleman is a professor at Duke University's School of Law, director of Duke’s Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility and co-director of its Wrongful Convictions Clinic. He specializes in the legal, political, and scientific causes of wrongful convictions and how they can be prevented. He previously represented criminal defendants in capital collateral proceedings, including Ted Bundy through Bundy’s execution in 1989.

  Brandon L. Garrett is a professor at Duke University’s School of Law and a leading expert on criminal justice outcomes, evidence and constitution rights. He is the author of five books, including End of its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice (Harvard University Press, 2017).
   

• Archive video interview:
  https://www.cbs17.com/news/north-carolina-news/a-look-inside-duke-laws-innocence-project-after-nc-man-freed/
   
• For additional comment, contact Professor Coleman at jcoleman@law.duke.edu or Professor Garrett at bgarrett@law.duke.edu