In the February 2026 episode of DPI’s podcast, 12:01: The Death Penalty in Context, Furonda Brasfield (pictured, left) and Taylor Bonner (pictured, below) speak with DPI Managing Director Anne Holsinger about the racial history of the death penalty and how current data and narratives about racial justice play a role in advocacy on the death penalty. As the Death Penalty Information Center’s Racial Justice Storyteller, Ms. Bonner blends data and history to tell the story of the death penalty throughout the U.S. Ms. Brasfield is the Director of Leadership Development at the U.S. Campaign to End the Death Penalty; in that role, she supports leaders in the death penalty movement across the country and leads the Noose to Needle campaign, educating the public about the death penalty’s historical ties to lynching. The two guests bring their distinct and complimentary expertise to a discussion of race and the death penalty in honor of the 100th anniversary of Black History Month.
The discussion covers the ways that the death penalty disproportionately affects communities of color, including the exclusion of Black citizens from capital juries and the ways the race of both the defendant and the victim affect death sentencing decisions. They also delve deeply into the history of race and the death penalty. Ms. Brasfield describes the direct link from lynching to the death penalty, saying, “If we look back to racial terror lynching, what we would see is the terroristic taking of Black life without due process, without any types of safety or controls for Black bodies. …[L]ynching was actually replaced with the death penalty because lynching didn’t look good. It was bad for business. And so many municipalities said that they could take over this lynching practice and they sanitized it with the modern day death penalty.”
Ms. Bonner explains how data can be used in shaping policy, pointing to the Racial Justice Acts that have been passed in three states, allowing incarcerated people to challenge their sentences using statistics “to show that race was a significant factor in seeking or imposing their death sentences.” She says of these laws, “they recognize that data itself is powerful evidence.” Ms. Brasfield speaks of the importance of highlighting the truth in calling for change. “Data is essentially the truth,” she says, highlighting how Ida B. Wells used the truth to shine a light on lynching, and how later civil rights leaders spoke truth to power: “It took the truth, it took the data, it took the stories in order to force our country to face itself and to make change.”
