Based at the State University of New York’s Albany cam­pus, the Capital Punishment Research Initiative (CPRI) is ded­i­cat­ed to con­duct­ing and sup­port­ing empir­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal stud­ies of the death penal­ty. CPRI research is con­duct­ed by the University’s grad­u­ate stu­dents and pro­fes­sors, as well as by col­lab­o­rat­ing researchers from around the coun­try. The cen­ter’s cur­rent projects include: 

  • Capital Jury Project II — Research on the deci­sion-mak­ing of cap­i­tal jurors. This research draws on the lit­er­a­ture con­cern­ing cog­ni­tive schema, iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and empa­thy, the inter­per­son­al dynam­ics of per­sua­sion in groups, and the inter­play of race, gen­der, and social class. The study builds on recent­ly devel­oped find­ings of stark dif­fer­ences in the deci­sion-mak­ing pat­terns of black and white jurors from the nation­al Capital Jury Project (CJP).
  • Abolitionist Oral History Project — This pro­gram involves con­duct­ing inter­views with a wide vari­ety of American activists in an effort to build an oral his­to­ry of the mid-20th cen­tu­ry and post-Furman move­ment to end cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in America.
  • National Death Penalty Archives — One of the orig­i­nal goals of the CPRI was to estab­lish and main­tain a col­lec­tion of archival mate­ri­als to doc­u­ment the his­to­ry of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and pre­serve resources for his­tor­i­cal schol­ar­ship. Through col­lab­o­ra­tion with the University at Albany Library’s M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, the CPRI has estab­lished the National Death Penalty Archives (NDPA).
  • Clemency Petitions as a Key to Wrongful Executions — This project involves the acqui­si­tion and analy­sis of clemen­cy peti­tions and relat­ed mate­ri­als filed in cap­i­tal cas­es across America. The Clemency Project intends to acquire an esti­mat­ed 600 – 700 such peti­tions and asso­ci­at­ed mate­ri­als, and com­plete an analy­sis that uses this mate­r­i­al. In essence, these clemen­cy requests can be viewed as a win­dow on the pro­cess­ing of cap­i­tal cas­es, and as a source of unique­ly detailed infor­ma­tion on the nature of faults pre­vi­ous­ly iden­ti­fied in the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penalty. 
Researchers at CPRI are also col­lab­o­rat­ing on two new projects, a study of state and fed­er­al death rows and a study of mur­der vic­tims’ fam­i­ly mem­bers. To learn more about the CPRI, vis­it its Web site. See Resources.
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