Publications & Testimony

As the first court hearing on Pervis Payne’s claim that his death sentence must be vacated because of his intellectual disability was about to get underway, prominent civil rights leaders and relatives of a civil rights icon added their voices to efforts to free the Tennessee death-row prisoner, who has consistently asserted his innocence. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), founded in 1957 by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights activists, participated in a…

DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham appeared on the July 16, 2021 episode of New Generation, a podcast produced by the Sharon (Pennsylvania) Herald, in connection with the newspaper’s Crime of Punishment editorial series. Dunham spoke with hosts Tanner Mondok and Janeé Avery in a broad-ranging discussion about systemic problems in the administration of the U.S. death penalty. Herald editor Jeff Gerritt, winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, previewed the paper’s editorial…

NEWS (7/21/21) — Ohio: The Ohio Supreme Court has vacated the conviction and death sentence for George Brinkman, finding that he had not been advised of critical constitutional rights when he entered a guilty plea in his 2018 capital trial and that his plea was therefore invalid. The justices vacated Brinkman’s plea and returned his case to the Cuyahoga County court to conduct a new trial. On November 5, 2018, Brinkman indicated to the court that he intended to plead guilty to capital murder…

In a ruling rendered along partisan lines without benefit of oral argument, the United States Supreme Court has overturned the decision of a federal appeals court that had vacated the death sentence imposed on an Alabama death-row prisoner whose trial lawyers had failed to obtain expert assistance to present evidence of his intellectual disability. By a vote of 6 – 3, with all members of the conservative bloc of justices voting for the prosecution, the Court on July 2, 2021 summarily reversed the…

Studies have consistently found that a system of criminal law in which the death penalty is available as a punishment is far more expensive than a system in which the most severe punishment is life without parole or a long prison term. Now, as the number of murder exonerations mounts across the United States, a previously hidden cost is emerging: the cost of liability for police and prosecutorial misconduct associated with the wrongful use or threatened use of the death penalty. The innocence…

At 3:00 a.m. Central time on July 14, 2020, after his notice of execution had expired, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) strapped Daniel Lewis Lee to an execution gurney in the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. With the execution chamber curtains closed, correctional officials left him there for four hours while federal prosecutors filed pleadings in a federal appeals court to lift a stay of execution they had forgotten was still in effect. When the stay was lifted at 6:36…

Major U.S. editorial writers have criticized the Biden administration’s June 30, 2021 announcement of a temporary moratorium on executions while the Department of Justice reviews Trump administration changes to U.S. execution practices, saying that the pause for a limited policy review fails to fulfill the President’s campaign pledge to work to end the federal death penalty. In editorials between July 5 and July 8, the Washington Post, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and CNHI Pulitzer…

The Arizona Supreme Court has rejected the efforts of Arizona prosecutors to expedite the executions of two death-row prisoners and further limit appeals judicial review of legal issues in their cases. The Arizona Attorney General’s office had sought to shorten judicial review in the cases of death-row prisoners Frank Atwood and Clarence Dixon after learning that the shelf life of the drugs it intended to use in the executions would expire before the executions could be carried out. Arizona…

The Arizona Attorney General’s office has asked the Arizona Supreme Court to curtail the time allotted to judicial review of legal issues in the cases of two death-row prisoners prosecutors want to execute, saying that the drugs they intend to use in the executions remain potent half as long as it had previously represented. Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (pictured) told the court in April 2021 that it should set expedited filing deadlines in advance of issuing execution warrants for…

Anthony Porter, an Illinois death-row exoneree whose case sparked a chain of events that ultimately led the state to abolish the death penalty, has died. He was 66 years old. In 1983, Porter was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of two teenagers in a southside Chicago park. No physical evidence linked him to the murders, but after more than 17 hours of coercive interrogation, another man, William Taylor, told police that he had seen Porter commit the murders. Porter came within…