How to Use the Death Penalty Census

Because of the com­plex legal process­es involved in death-penal­ty cas­es, even appar­ent­ly straight­for­ward con­cepts such as coun­ty or year of sen­tence are not as sim­ple as they may seem. To help you under­stand the data­base, we have cre­at­ed and encour­age you to review the Death Penalty Census Codebook. The code­book, locat­ed here, pro­vides an in-depth expla­na­tion of how to inter­pret sen­tenc­ing infor­ma­tion in the database.

The Death Penalty Census data­base itself can be found here. The data­base allows you to search death sen­tences by name of the defen­dant sen­tenced and fil­ter by a vari­ety of fields shown below. For a down­load­able CSV ver­sion of the Death Penalty Census, click here.

Each line in the data­base rep­re­sents a sin­gle death sen­tence. The fields, or columns shown below, pro­vide infor­ma­tion about each death sen­tence, includ­ing the year of the sen­tence, the juris­dic­tion in which the sen­tence was imposed, the out­come of the sen­tence, and infor­ma­tion on how the sen­tence relates to oth­er death sen­tences imposed on the same defen­dant. The fields also pro­vide infor­ma­tion on the per­son sen­tenced, includ­ing their name, gen­der, and race.

Note: Each line in the data­base rep­re­sents a sin­gle sen­tence, not a person.

The Multi-Sentence Identifier field is used to describe cir­cum­stances in which an indi­vid­ual was sen­tenced to death more than once. The field iden­ti­fies 1) cas­es in which a defen­dant was sen­tenced and resen­tenced to death in a sin­gle crim­i­nal pro­ceed­ing and 2) instances in which the same defen­dant was sen­tenced to death in mul­ti­ple unre­lat­ed pro­ceed­ings. This field is left blank when a list­ed sen­tence is the only death sen­tence imposed on the defendant.

The num­ber before the peri­od rep­re­sents the case, or the pro­ceed­ing against the defen­dant for a spe­cif­ic crim­i­nal act (or set of crim­i­nal acts if those acts were all tried in a sin­gle pro­ceed­ing by the pros­e­cut­ing author­i­ty). The num­ber after the peri­od rep­re­sents the suc­ces­sion of death sen­tences in a case.

For a deep­er expla­na­tion of this field and oth­ers, read the Field Definitions sec­tion of the code­book.

With a data­base this size, there will inevitably be some errors or omis­sions. Our goal is for the Death Penalty Census to be as accu­rate and com­pre­hen­sive as pos­si­ble, and we wel­come any addi­tions or cor­rec­tions. To cor­rect an error or pro­vide miss­ing infor­ma­tion, please noti­fy us by email and send doc­u­men­ta­tion of the cor­rect infor­ma­tion to DeathPenaltyCensus@​deathpenaltyinfo.​org.