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A look at mental illness and the death penalty: “The doctor would later testify that Andre was ‘really mentally ill,’ as if to stress that this wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill crazy person. And then there was this detail from the physician’s records: “Thomas,” he wrote, “is psychotic. He thinks something like Holodeck on Star Trek […]

Greg Ousley murdered his parents when he was 14, and is now serving a 60-year sentence. A look at the debate over how we should punish minors for committing violent crimes: “Today there are well more than 2,500 juveniles serving time in adult prisons in the United States — enough, in Indiana’s case, to fill […]

Inside the groundbreaking investigation by Columbia professor James Liebman, on the case of Carlos DeLuna, who was executed in 1989 for a crime he didn’t commit: “At the trial, DeLuna’s defence team told the jury that Carlos Hernandez, not DeLuna, was the murderer. But the prosecutors ridiculed that suggestion. They told the jury that police […]

[Part One of “Punched Out: The Life and Death of a Hockey Enforcer.”] But big-time hockey has a unique side entrance. Boogaard could fight his way there with his bare knuckles, his stick dropped, the game paused and the crowd on its feet. And he did, all the way until he became the Boogeyman, the […]

Retired Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens on David Garland’s “Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition.” “Two years ago, quoting from an earlier opinion written by Justice White, I wrote that the death penalty represents ‘the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or […]

The chair is bolted to the floor near the back of a 12-ft. by 18-ft. room. You sit on a seat of cracked rubber secured by rows of copper tacks. Your ankles are strapped into half-moon-shaped foot cuffs lined with canvas. A 2-in.-wide greasy leather belt with 28 buckle holes and worn grooves where it […]