DPIC Special Reports

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Nov 14, 2024

Fool’s Gold: How the Federal Death Penalty Has Perpetuated Racially Discriminatory Practices Throughout History

In 2020, President Joe Biden promised to end the fed­er­al death penal­ty dur­ing his admin­is­tra­tion and his Attorney General, Merrick Garland, acknowl­edged its many long­stand­ing con­cerns as rea­sons to pause fed­er­al exe­cu­tions pend­ing an inter­nal review of Department of Justice poli­cies and prac­tices. Project 2025, the prod­uct of a polit­i­cal con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, calls for President Trump to obtain final­i­ty” for all fed­er­al death row pris­on­ers. Before any deci­sion about future use of the…

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May 14, 2024

Broken Promises: How a History of Racial Violence and Bias Shaped Ohio’s Death Penalty

In January 2024, Ohio law­mak­ers announced plans to expand the use of the death penal­ty to per­mit exe­cu­tions with nitro­gen gas, as Alabama had just done a week ear­li­er. But at the same time the Attorney General and the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association are cham­pi­oning this leg­is­la­tion, a bipar­ti­san group of state leg­is­la­tors has intro­duced a bill to abol­ish the death penal­ty based on sig­nif­i­cant con­cerns on who is sen­tenced to death and how that sen­tence is car­ried out.” The competing…

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Jun 16, 2023

Doomed to Repeat: The Legacy of Race in Tennessee’s Contemporary Death Penalty

The his­tor­i­cal use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in Tennessee shows a clear con­nec­tion between the extra­ju­di­cial lynch­ings of the 1800s and 1900s and the state sanc­tioned death penal­ty prac­tices of today. As one lynch­ing expert notes, “[l]ocal tra­di­tions, sit­u­a­tions, and per­son­al­i­ties must be con­sid­ered in any attempt to explain pat­terns of lynch­ing.…” This empha­sis on local­i­ty par­al­lels mod­ern death penal­ty trends in Tennessee — as well as the rest of the nation — where­in death sen­tenc­ing is heavily…

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Oct 14, 2022

Deeply Rooted: How Racial History Informs Oklahoma’s Death Penalty

Oklahoma’s death penal­ty is at a cross­roads. On August 25, 2022, Oklahoma exe­cut­ed the first per­son in a series of 25 exe­cu­tions set to occur near­ly every month through 2024. The pro­ject­ed increase in exe­cu­tions in Oklahoma comes while the death penal­ty is in decline nation­wide; 2021 had the fewest exe­cu­tions since 1988. Furthermore, Oklahoma’s planned exe­cu­tions are sched­uled to move for­ward despite evi­dence that there are seri­ous prob­lems with Oklahoma’s death penal­ty that the state has…

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