CU death-penalty expert gets alma mater’s nod

Michael Radelet, professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder widely known for his research on racial bias and wrongful convictions in death-penalty cases, has been named one of four 2011 Distinguished Alumni of Purdue University.

Throughout his academic career, Radelet has worked actively to shape more “just and humane policies on capital punishment,” Purdue University states. His research focuses on the issues of erroneous convictions, racial bias, public opinion and medical involvement.

Radelet works closely with international organizations such as the United Nations and Amnesty International on death penalty issues. He has worked with scores of death-row inmates, participating in last visits with several dozen individuals and testifying in 76 death-penalty cases in a dozen states. He has also worked with families of murder victims where the cases have not been solved.

Radelet served for 22 years on the faculty at the University of Florida before moving to CU in 2001. He chaired the Sociology Departments at the University of Florida from 1996-2001 and the University of Colorado from 2004-2009. In addition to his degree work, Radelet completed two years of postdoctoral training in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin Medical School.

Among other notable scholarly work, Radelet and co-author Hugo Adam Bedau published a 1987 paper in Stanford Law Review that documented some 350 defendants who were erroneously convicted of potentially capital crimes. The article is widely credited with introducing the problem of erroneous convictions into the modern death-penalty debate.

His studies on race and death sentencing included one in Illinois conducted for Gov. George Ryan and used by the governor as part of the rationale for commuting 167 death sentences in 2003.

More recently, Radelet  and co-author Glenn Pierce published a series of statewide studies on race and death sentencing for the Death Penalty Moratorium Project of the American Bar Association. Radelet and Pierce’s latest work in this area focuses North Carolina and East Baton Rouge Parish.

The study examining death sentences in North Carolina over a 28-year period ending in 2007 shows that among similar homicides, the odds of a death sentence for those who are suspected of killing whites are approximately three times higher than the odds of a death sentence for those suspected of killing blacks.

It is the most comprehensive study of the modern administration of the death penalty in North Carolina to date.

“It’s just kind of baffling that in this day and age, race matters,” Radelet told CU’s Office of News Services.

In recent years he has been especially involved in death penalty projects in China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Zimbabwe and several countries in Europe.

Radelet earned his bachelor’s in sociology from Michigan State University, his master’s from Eastern Michigan University, and his Ph.D. from Purdue in 1977.

May 2011