Stevens and Death Penalty - Letter to the Editor of The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re "Stevens Settles Legal Mystery in Frank Essay" (Supreme Court Memo, front page, Nov. 28):

When the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of lethal injection in April 2008, Justice John Paul Stevens announced that he had concluded that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment. Yet between then and the date Justice Stevens left the court in 2010, nearly 120 people were executed in the United States, virtually all of them with Justice Steven's acquiescence.

It is nice, now that he has retired, that Justice Stevens is amplifying his reasons for finding capital punishment unconstitutional. It would have been nicer if, when he still had the power, he had voted to stop the scores of executions he instead voted to allow.

David R. Dow -- Houston, Nov. 28, 2010

The writer, a death penalty lawyer, is a professor at the University of Houston Law Center.

Source: Letter to the Editor, New York Times, December 3, 2010 - David R. Dow is the University Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston Law Center. In March 2000, Dow founded the Texas Innocence Network, an organization that uses UH law students to investigate claims of actual innocence brought by Texas prisoners. He is also the litigation director at the Texas Defender Service, a nonprofit law firm that provides representation to death row inmates and works for reforms to the criminal justice system, especially on issues involving indigent defendants. Mr. Dow's Website can be found here.