Publications & Testimony

NEWS (10/​5/​20) — Washington, D.C.: The 2020 – 2021 U.S. Supreme Court term opened on October 5 with the Court declin­ing to review chal­lenges to more than 30 death-penalty court…

The U.S. Senate is prepar­ing to move for­ward on October 12, 2020 with con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings on the con­tro­ver­sial nom­i­na­tion of con­ser­v­a­tive fed­er­al appeals judge Amy Coney Barrett to fill the Supreme Court vacan­cy caused by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. If con­firmed, Judge Barrett would shift the cen­ter of the Court far­ther to the right, solid­i­fy­ing the hold of a con­ser­v­a­tive major­i­ty that has become increas­ing­ly hos­tile to constitutional…

A new report by the National Registry of Exonerations has found that police or pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct is ram­pant in death-row exon­er­a­tion cas­es and occurs even more fre­quent­ly when the wrongfully death-sentenced…

North Carolina​’s death penal­ty is a weapon of social con­trol root­ed in a racist past. That is the mes­sage of a ground­break­ing new col­lab­o­ra­tive project, Racist Roots: Origins of North Carolina’s Death Penalty, by the Durham-based defense orga­ni­za­tion Center for Death Penalty Litigation…

A new papal encycli­cal let­ter tells Catholics around the world that “[t]here can be no step­ping back” from the Church’s for­mal oppo­si­tion to the…

The Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) have issued new reports doc­u­ment­ing the con­tin­u­ing his­toric decline of the death penal­ty across the…

NEWS (10/​1/​20) — Washington, D.C.: The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment has sched­uled an eighth exe­cu­tion for 2020, set­ting a November 19 exe­cu­tion date for Orlando Hall. Hall’s case would be the first fed­er­al exe­cu­tion in more than a half-cen­­tu­ry for the killing of an African-American vic­tim and the sec­ond con­sec­u­tive exe­cu­tion of an African-American pris­on­er after the exe­cu­tions of five white prisoners and…

In a 5 – 4 deci­sion, the Supreme Court declined to over­turn James Erin McKinney’s Arizona death sen­tences. McKinney was sen­tenced to death in 1993 for the killings of two peo­ple in the course of a series of bur­glar­ies. McKinney’s mit­i­ga­tion evi­dence includ­ed evi­dence of a child­hood filled with insta­bil­i­ty, abuse, and neglect. This severe child­hood abuse result­ed in McKinney being diag­nosed with post­trau­mat­ic stress disorder…

For sec­ond time in eight days, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) has reversed course after ini­tial­ly reject­ing a death-row prisoner’s claim of intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty and has resen­tenced the pris­on­er to life. The deci­sions, both involv­ing for­eign nation­als and both sup­port­ed by local pros­e­cu­tors, marked the sixth and sev­enth time that Texas courts have vacat­ed death sen­tences imposed on intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled cap­i­tal defendants since…

In the September 30, 2020 episode of the Discussions With DPIC pod­cast, Native American Rights Fund senior staff attor­ney Joel Williams joins Death Penalty Information Center exec­u­tive direc­tor Robert Dunham for a con­ver­sa­tion about trib­al sov­er­eign­ty, the death penal­ty, and the his­toric U.S. Supreme Court rul­ing in McGirt v.