In-Depth Reports

The United States Supreme Court approved the re-instate­ment of the death penal­ty 35 years ago on July 2, 1976. Although the death penal­ty had ear­li­er been held uncon­sti­tu­tion­al because of its arbi­trary and unpre­dictable appli­ca­tion, the Court was will­ing to sanc­tion new sys­tems that states had pro­posed to make cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment less like ​“being struck by light­ning” and more like ret­ri­bu­tion for only the ​“worst of the worst” offend­ers. The Court also deferred to the states’ judg­ment that the…

Smart on Crime is a new report from the Death Penalty Information Center that explores the prospect of sav­ing states hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars by end­ing the death penal­ty. The report also serves to release a nation­al poll of police chiefs in which they rank the death penal­ty at the bot­tom of their pri­or­i­ties for achiev­ing a safer…

According to a nation­al pub­lic opin­ion poll con­duct­ed in 2007, the pub­lic is los­ing con­fi­dence in the death penal­ty. People are deeply con­cerned about the risk of exe­cut­ing the inno­cent, about the fair­ness of the process, and about the inabil­i­ty of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment to accom­plish its basic pur­pos­es. Most Americans believe that inno­cent peo­ple have already been exe­cut­ed, that the death penal­ty is not a deter­rent to crime, and that a mora­to­ri­um should be placed on all…

Blind Justice, the most recent report to be released by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), is the first to focus on the prob­lems of the death penal­ty from the per­spec­tive of jurors. While jurors have always occu­pied an esteemed posi­tion in the broad­er crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem in the United States, in cap­i­tal cas­es the respon­si­bil­i­ty of jurors is even more crit­i­cal as they decide whether defen­dants should live or die. Even with this unique author­i­ty in cap­i­tal cas­es, they are treated…

This report cat­a­logs the emer­gence of inno­cence as the most impor­tant issue in the long-sim­mer­ing death penal­ty debate. The sheer num­ber of cas­es and the per­va­sive aware­ness of this trend in the public’s con­scious­ness have changed the way cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is per­ceived around the coun­try. The steady evo­lu­tion of this issue since the death penal­ty was rein­stat­ed in 1976 has been accel­er­at­ed in recent years by the devel­op­ment of DNA tech­nol­o­gy, the new gold stan­dard of forensic investigation.