Publications & Testimony

Women face ​“wide­spread dis­crim­i­na­to­ry prac­tices in the cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tion and deten­tion” in death-penal­ty coun­tries around the world, accord­ing to a new report by the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide and the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty. The report, Judged for More Than Her Crime: A Global Overview of Women Facing the Death Penalty—released at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland on September 18, 2018 — exam­ines the use…

For the first time in more than a quar­ter cen­tu­ry, few­er than 2,500 pris­on­ers across the United States now face active death sen­tences. According to the lat­est Death Row USA nation­al cen­sus by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), released in ear­ly September 2018, 2,743 peo­ple were on death rows in 32 states and the U.S. fed­er­al and mil­i­tary death rows on April 1, 2018. That total includes 249 peo­ple who were pre­vi­ous­ly sen­tenced to death but face the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a cap­i­tal resen­tenc­ing after…

A land­mark arti­cle in the Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy pro­vides a ​“com­pi­la­tion of mile­stones in the American expe­ri­ence with cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment,” track­ing more than 400 years of the ​“inglo­ri­ous expe­ri­ence with cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment” in what is now the United States. Authors Rob Warden (pic­tured, left), Executive Director Emeritus at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law’s Bluhm Legal Clinic Center on Wrongful Convictions, and Daniel…

In a peri­od of less than one week, four for­mer death-row pris­on­ers in four sep­a­rate states learned that they no longer face exe­cu­tion, con­tribut­ing to the con­tin­u­ing decline in the num­ber of peo­ple on death rows across the U.S. The result of the unre­lat­ed court pro­ceed­ings — a resen­tenc­ing hear­ing in Pennsylvania, a non-cap­i­tal grand jury indict­ment in Louisiana, a prosecutor’s deci­sion to drop death in Indiana, and a court rul­ing on…

Four years after intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled broth­ers Henry McCollum and Leon Brown were exon­er­at­ed of the 1983 rape and mur­der of an 11-year-old girl in North Carolina, jurors in McCollum’s case met with mem­bers of his defense team and reflect­ed on how they sen­tenced an inno­cent man to death. In a September 6 op-ed in the Raleigh News & Observer, Kristin Collins — Associate Director of Public Information for North…

Billy Ray Irick (pic­tured) was tor­tured to death dur­ing his August 9, 2018 exe­cu­tion in Tennessee, accord­ing to one the nation’s leading…

In the lat­est episode of our Discussions with DPIC pod­cast, Keelah Williams (pic­tured), assis­tant pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy at Hamilton College in New York, joins DPIC exec­u­tive direc­tor Robert Dunham to dis­cuss the impli­ca­tions of new research on the death penal­ty and resource…

Incoming United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet (pic­tured), has con­demned the mass tri­al of more than 700 pro­test­ers in a Cairo, Egypt, crim­i­nal court, in which 75 defen­dants were sen­tenced to death. The court also imposed life sen­tences on 47 oth­ers on September 8 and sen­tenced anoth­er 612 defen­dants to prison terms of 15, 10, or 5 years. The defen­dants faced charges rang­ing from ​“ille­gal gath­er­ing” to murder…

The Louisiana Supreme Court has unan­i­mous­ly over­turned the con­vic­tion of death-row pris­on­er Brian Douglas Horn (pic­tured), after Horn’s lawyer con­ced­ed — over Horn’s explic­it objec­tion — that his client had killed and also may have molest­ed 12-year-old Justin Bloxom. The September 7, 2018 rul­ing is the lat­est fall­out in Louisiana from the U.S. Supreme Court’s deci­sion ear­li­er this year in McCoy v. Louisiana, which declared that…

Defense attor­neys for Sayfullo Saipov (pic­tured), the man accused of killing eight peo­ple by dri­ving a truck onto a Manhattan bike path on October 31, 2017, have asked a New York fed­er­al dis­trict court to bar the U.S. gov­ern­ment from seek­ing the death penal­ty against Saipov. Arguing that President Donald Trump has uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly inject­ed ​“naked­ly polit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions” into the Department of Justice’s charg­ing deci­sion, Saipov’s lawyers on September 6, 2018, filed a…