New Podcast: The DPIC 2019 Year End Report

In the December 2019 edi­tion of the Discussions with DPIC pod­cast, Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham and Managing Director Anne Holsinger dis­cuss DPIC’s 2019 Year End Report. The pod­cast explores the major themes pre­sent­ed in the year’s death-penal­ty news and devel­op­ments, includ­ing inno­cence, declin­ing use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, and sys­temic prob­lems revealed by the new death sen­tences and exe­cu­tions in 2019. 

The two major themes of the 2019 report, Dunham said, were ​“that the death penal­ty appears to be dis­ap­pear­ing in some parts of the coun­try and erod­ing in oth­ers” and ​“the con­tin­ued unre­li­a­bil­i­ty of the death penal­ty” in the cas­es in which it was imposed or car­ried out. He tells the sto­ries of some of the year’s notable cas­es, includ­ing Rodney Reed and Domineque Ray. The con­ver­sa­tion also cov­ers some of the long-term trends in cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, espe­cial­ly the sus­tained decline in new death sen­tences and executions. 

Dunham spends much of the pod­cast telling com­pelling and emo­tion­al sto­ries from the year, draw­ing out the ways in which those sto­ries illus­trate broad­er themes about the death-penal­ty sys­tem. He and Holsinger take a look at the clemen­cy process in 2019, not­ing some of the cas­es in which peti­tions’ requests for clemen­cy were denied or not pur­sued, as well as the two grants of clemen­cy in Kentucky at the end of the year. One of those case involved such abysmal rep­re­sen­ta­tion that Governor Matt Bevin observed, ​“to say [Gregory Wilson​’s] legal defense was inad­e­quate would be the under­state­ment of the year.” The oth­er, the case of Leif Halvorsen, pro­vid­ed a pow­er­ful exam­ple of remorse and redemption. 

Innocence cas­es in 2019 raised issues of junk sci­ence, racial bias, offi­cial mis­con­duct, and defi­cient appel­late review, Dunham said. The year’s exe­cu­tions, he said, reflect­ed that ​“the death penal­ty was car­ried out on the most vul­ner­a­ble, rather than the most cul­pa­ble,” as 19 of the 22 exe­cu­tions involved pris­on­ers who exhib­it­ed evi­dence of seri­ous men­tal ill­ness, brain dam­age, or an IQ in the intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled range, or who had expe­ri­enced severe, chronic trauma.

The lat­ter half of the episode moves to a dis­cus­sion of death penal­ty trends and their under­ly­ing caus­es. Dunham describes changes in pub­lic opin­ion on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, region­al divides, and the polit­i­cal shifts that have led even con­ser­v­a­tive states to recon­sid­er the death penal­ty. He says that a ​“cul­ture change” is under­way as the pub­lic grows more aware of inno­cence cas­es, mur­der rates remain low, and younger Americans become more skep­ti­cal of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. The public’s changed view of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, Dunham said, helps to explain why the attempts by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to resume exe­cu­tions did not appear to influ­ence new death sen­tences and exe­cu­tions at the state and coun­ty lev­els. Dunham con­cludes, ​“we may be reach­ing a point in which it is con­sid­ered an out­lier prac­tice, just hav­ing the death penal­ty at all.”