As glob­al experts gath­er in Paris this week to exam­ine the state of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment world­wide, the Death Penalty Information Center will be among them, as a source of author­i­ta­tive data and research on how the death penal­ty is oper­at­ing in the United States. 

The 9th World Congress Against the Death Penalty, orga­nized by ECPM (Ensemble Contre la Peine de Mort) and host­ed by the French Republic, runs June 30 through July 2 at the Maison de la Radio et de la Musique in Paris. The first Congress was held in Strasbourg, France in 2001, and the event has con­vened every three years since, mov­ing between cities includ­ing Montreal, Geneva, Madrid, Oslo, Brussels, and Berlin. This Congress draws more than 1,500 par­tic­i­pants from over 100 coun­tries, includ­ing heads of state, diplo­mats, par­lia­men­tar­i­ans, civ­il soci­ety orga­ni­za­tions, and jour­nal­ists — mak­ing it the largest inter­na­tion­al gath­er­ing focused on the use and future of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. France abol­ished the death penal­ty in 1981; this year, French President Emmanuel Macron made open­ing remarks to Congress participants. 

DPI’s Executive Director Robin Maher was invit­ed to present on a pan­el titled: The Death Penalty in a Shifting World: How to Respond to the Current Resurgence? This con­ver­sa­tion addressed the fac­tors dri­ving the increase in exe­cu­tions and leg­isla­tive pro­pos­als to expand the death penal­ty in the United States despite a five-decade low in pub­lic sup­port. Globally, 113 coun­tries and ter­ri­to­ries have abol­ished the death penal­ty, and near­ly three-quar­ters of UN mem­ber states no longer car­ry out exe­cu­tions. In the United States, there is a dif­fer­ent trend: after decades of con­sis­tent decline, exe­cu­tions ticked up last year in response to renewed polit­i­cal sup­port at the fed­er­al lev­el. Ms. Maher’s remarks drew on DPI’s data to explain this increase, not­ing that most data, includ­ing the low num­ber of new death sen­tences, indi­cate that the coun­try con­tin­ues to move away from the death penalty. 

Since 1990, DPI has com­piled and pub­lished the most com­pre­hen­sive data avail­able on how the death penal­ty is used in the United States — track­ing exe­cu­tions, death sen­tences, exon­er­a­tions, costs, pub­lic opin­ion, secre­cy data, and racial and geo­graph­ic dis­par­i­ties. This body of work has made DPI the pri­ma­ry source for jour­nal­ists, attor­neys, researchers, and the courts. The data-dri­ven research is what brings DPI to Paris, to present an evi­dence-based pic­ture of the death penal­ty in the United States. 

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