Publications & Testimony

On Martin Luther King Day, DPIC looks at the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King’s views on capital punishment. In a November 1957 article in Ebony, Dr. King was asked “Do you think God approves the death penalty for crimes like rape and murder?” He responded, “I do not think that God approves the death penalty for any crime, rape and murder included…. Capital punishment is against the better judgment of modern criminology, and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of…

The same brand of Southern pride that inspired lynchings after the U.S. Civil War fuels support for the death penalty today, writes legal analyst Joia Erin Thornton (pictured) in a commentary on the web publication, Blavity. In The Dark Southern Pride Upholding The Barbaric Death Penalty, published December 23, 2021, Thornton argues that, just as Southern states in Reconstruction turned to extreme carceral punishments to reimpose violent control over Black Americans after the abolition of…

Kentucky’s death penalty is racially discriminatory, geographically arbitrary, and riddled with systemic flaws, a new study of the commonwealth’s use of capital punishment has found. The study, A Statistical Overview of the Kentucky Death Penalty, by University of North Carolina political scientist Frank R. Baumgartner, examined Kentucky’s use of the death penalty from 1975, when its current system was implemented, to the present. Prof. Baumgartner released his analysis of the results on…

In the January 2022 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Contra Costa County, California District Attorney Diana Becton (pictured), speaks with Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham about the rise in reform prosecutors across the country, the inherent flaws in capital punishment that led her to work alongside other reform prosecutors to end the death penalty, and her efforts as district attorney to bring fairness and equity to the criminal legal system. Becton is the…

A coalition of disability rights groups, legal experts, and conservative advocates are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the uniquely harsh burden of proof Georgia has imposed upon defendants seeking to establish their ineligibility for the death penalty because of intellectual disability. In four friend-of-the-court briefs filed in late December 2021, two former U.S. solicitors general, eight former prosecutors and judges, seven leading disability rights organizations, scholars…

An Alabama federal judge has issued an order halting the scheduled January 27, 2022 execution of Matthew Reeves (pictured). On January 7, Judge R. Austin Huffaker of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, granted a preliminary injunction preventing Alabama from executing Reeves “by any method other than nitrogen hypoxia.” Huffaker found that Reeves is likely to succeed in his claim that the state violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) when prison officials…

As 2021 came to a close, editorial writers in four death penalty states called for legislative and executive action to end capital punishment or further limit its use. Editorial boards for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Idaho Statesman took note that as the death penalty declines in usage and public support, it remains arbitrary and inhumane in its application and continues to place innocent lives at risk. Additionally, recently retired Los Angeles Times…

On January 6, 1959, Richard and Mildred Loving were convicted on felony charges of “miscegenation” under Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, which criminalized interracial marriage. The trial court sentenced them to one year in prison but suspended the sentence conditioned upon their leaving Virginia and not returning together for 25 years. The court wrote: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference…

A former conservative federal judge and U.S. Solicitor General has called on the United States Supreme Court to vacate a ruling by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) that allowed a Texas death sentence to stand in the face of an earlier Supreme Court ruling that defense counsel had unreasonably failed to present a “tidal wave” of “compelling mitigating evidence.” Kenneth W. Starr (pictured), who was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by…

A hospice-bound death-row prisoner has filed a motion in Idaho state court challenging the authority of Governor Brad Little to reject a pardons commission recommendation that his death sentence be commuted to life without possibility of parole. Gerald Pizzuto, Jr., who was sentenced to death in 1986 for the killings of two gold prospectors, suffers from advanced bladder cancer, chronic heart and coronary artery disease, coronary obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and Type 2 diabetes with…