Publications & Testimony

Legal reform advocates and a committee of high-profile Supreme Court practitioners have urged the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States to recommend changes in the way the Court handles emergency applications for stays of executions in death-penalty cases. In testimony in public hearings before the Commission in June and July 2021, Innocence Project Executive Director Christina Swarns, who argued the Texas death-penalty case Buck v. Davis before the Court, and the…

As President Biden considers his administration’s policy on the federal death penalty, his expressed opposition to the punishment may be buoyed by a new study that has found that “Americans support capital punishment less than they have at any time since the modern death penalty system was established in 1976.” The polling analysis, conducted by University of North Carolina political science professor Frank R. Baumgartner and published August 3, 2021 in the Washington Post’s data feature…

Racial bias in jury selection is compromising the “credibility, reliability, and integrity of the legal system,” and its effects are especially pronounced in death penalty cases, a new report from the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has found. EJI’s report, Race and the Jury: Illegal Discrimination in Jury Selection, released online July 27, 2021, places the continuing illegal exclusion of jurors of color in its historical context as “a continuing legacy of our history of racial injustice,”…

Two Ohio civil rights organizations have filed suit against the state’s parole board, alleging that the board has an illegal policy of automatically denying parole to anyone who was formerly sentenced to death. On July 28, 2021, the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio and the Ohio Justice & Policy Center sued the Ohio Parole Board on behalf of Patricia Wernert and George Clayton (pictured), both of whom were sentenced to death under a law that was declared unconstitutional in 1978. Neither…

Seven months into 2021, executions in the United States are near historic lows. As of the end of July, only the former federal administration and the state of Texas had carried out any executions, and the five prisoners put to death placed the country on pace for the fewest executions since five states carried out a total of five executions in 1983. The three federal executions carried out in the waning days of the Trump administration ended an historically aberrant six months and two days in…

The Nevada Press Association has filed a federal lawsuit against Nevada state officials and the Nevada Department of Corrections challenging limitations the state’s execution protocol places on the media’s ability to witness and report on executions. In a complaint filed in the United States District Court for the District of Nevada on July 23, 2021, the ACLU of Nevada, representing the press association, argued that the state’s execution protocol violates the media and the public’s First…

When Dennis Perry stood with his defense team on the steps of the Brunswick, Georgia courthouse (pictured) after a trial judge dismissed all charges against him, he was a free man, exonerated of the racially motivated murders of a deacon and his wife in a local Black church in 1985. His case was one of at least four death-penalty prosecutions involving misconduct by Brunswick Judicial Circuit Assistant District Attorney John B. Johnson III. And it was the latest of more than 30 exonerations…

A federal appeals court has upheld a lower court’s decision granting a new trial to a Pennsylvania death-row prisoner whose retained lawyer was prevented from representing him at trial. In a unanimous decision issued on July 20, 2021, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that Samuel Randolph’s right to representation by counsel of choice was violated when the trial court refused to grant even a three-hour continuance to permit his chosen lawyer to…

In the July 2021 episode of Discussions with DPIC, DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham talks with Marc Bookman, the co-founder and Executive Director of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation (ACCR), about his critically acclaimed new book, A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays. In their discussion, Bookman and Dunham explore a wide range of systemic death-penalty problems addressed in the book, which was released by The New Press in May 2021. The topics…

The parliament of Sierra Leone voted unanimously on July 23, 2021 to abolish the death penalty, making the West African nation of 7.8 million people the 23^rd country on the continent and the 110^th worldwide to end capital punishment. Pledging to sign the bill into law, President Julius Maada Bio (pictured) said on Twitter, “Today, I have fulfilled a governance pledge to permanently abolish the death penalty in Sierra Leone. I thank citizens, members of Parliament, development partners, and…