Publications & Testimony

Defendants of col­or and for­eign nation­als who are intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly like­ly to be sen­tenced to death, a Death Penalty Information Center analy­sis of cas­es involv­ing intel­lec­tu­al­ly disabled defendants…

New COVID-19 out­breaks on the nation’s death rows have killed pris­on­ers in Ohio and Missouri and sick­ened at least 11 men on Tennessee​’s death…

Saying that the state lacked the abil­i­ty to car­ry out a lethal injec­tion, the South Carolina Supreme Court has stayed the sched­uled December 4, 2020 exe­cu­tion of Richard Moore (pic­tured). With no state exe­cu­tions sched­uled for the remain­der of the year, the stay means that states will car­ry out few­er exe­cu­tions in 2020 than in any year since…

In two long-await­ed deci­sions that will alter the land­scape of Florida’s death row, the Florida Supreme Court has lim­it­ed the reach of a land­mark rul­ing that over­turned the state’s con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­hi­bi­tion against death sen­tences imposed after a non-unan­i­mous jury vote for death. The court’s January 2020 deci­sion in State v. Poole had raised the specter that the court might rescind orders that had over­turned the death sen­tences of more than 100 Florida death-row prisoners and…

The range of meth­ods avail­able to the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to car­ry out exe­cu­tions could be expand­ed under a new Department of Justice reg­u­la­tion pub­lished on November 27,…

For the eighth time since 2007, the United Nations General Assembly has adopt­ed a res­o­lu­tion call­ing for a glob­al mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions. The res­o­lu­tion passed on November 17, 2020 by a vote of 120 – 39 with 24 coun­tries abstain­ing. The United States vot­ed against the res­o­lu­tion. The 120 nations sup­port­ing the mea­sure matched the record lev­el of sup­port set in 2018. For the first time, the res­o­lu­tion specif­i­cal­ly iden­ti­fied women among the groups dis­crim­i­nat­ed against in the…

In the November 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Gretchen Engel (pic­tured, left), Executive Director of North Carolina’s Center for Death Penalty Litigation (CDPL), joins Ngozi Ndulue (pic­tured, below), Senior Director of Research and Special Projects at DPIC, for a dis­cus­sion of their orga­ni­za­tions’ recent reports on race and the death penal­ty. This fall, DPIC released Enduring Injustice: The Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty.

Public sup­port for the death penal­ty is at its low­est lev­el in a half-cen­tu­ry, with oppo­si­tion high­er than any time since 1966, accord­ing to the 2020 annu­al Gallup poll on Americans’ atti­tudes about capital…