Publications & Testimony

The Death Penalty Information Center has modernized and expanded its award-winning website. On June 14, 2019, DPIC launched its redesigned website, culminating a two-year project that involved the transfer and reorganization of information on the Center’s more than 7,000 webpages. Among the most notable additions of the new website are 20 interactive Tableau graphics, including States With and Without the Death Penalty, Prisoners on Death Row, and a number of graphics on executions…

A North Carolina death-row prisoner is seeking a new trial based on allegations that prosecutors in his case used a training document steeped in racist stereotypes to manufacture pretextual reasons to exclude African Americans from serving on his jury. In a June 4, 2019 court filing in the appeal of Russell William Tucker (pictured), two national experts say that the Forsyth County prosecutors unconstitutionally exercised their discretionary juror challenges on the basis of race to strike all…

The Ohio House of Representatives has overwhelmingly approved a bill that would ban the death penalty for offenders who were seriously mentally ill at the time of the offense. House Bill 136, sponsored by Rep. Brett Hillyer (R – Uhrichsville, pictured), passed the House by a vote of 76 – 18 on June 5, 2019 with bipartisan support and was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 11. Hillyer’s bill would remove the death penalty as a sentencing option for defendants who can show they had…

The U.S. Supreme Court has granted review of an Arizona death-penalty case in which the state courts first refused to consider a defendant’s mitigating evidence and then denied his request for a jury sentencing hearing after his death sentence was overturned. The Court on June 10, 2019 granted the petition for writ of certiorari filed by Arizona death-row prisoner James Erin McKinney (pictured) 26 years after he was first sentenced to death. In 1993, McKinney was convicted for two murders…

A special prosecutor in Harris County, Texas, has filed a complaint with the Texas State Bar Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel against former Assistant District Attorney Daniel Rizzo, alleging that Rizzo intentionally concealed exculpatory evidence crucial to the exoneration of former death-row prisoner Alfred Dewayne Brown (pictured). Brown was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death in 2005 for a robbery murder in which a store clerk and responding police officer were shot to death.

NEWS (6/16): On this date 75 years ago, South Carolina executed George Stinney, an innocent 14-year-old black boy framed for the murders of two young white girls. The Stinney family was forced to flee their home in Alcolu because of the threat of violence. Stinney was tried before an all-white jury in a trial that took less than half a day. He was the only black person in the courthouse. The jury took just ten minutes to convict him and sentence him to death. His lawyer did not file an appeal…

A study of tax rates and crime rates in Texas counties has found that death-penalty trials contribute to higher property tax rates and increased rates of property crime. Alex Lundberg (pictured), an assistant professor of Economics at West Virginia University, analyzed budgetary and crime rate data from Texas counties and found that counties responded to the high cost burden of capital trials by raising property taxes and reducing public safety expenditures. As an example, he cites Jasper…

One year after a state task force issued a report calling Pennsylvania’s death penalty seriously flawed and in need of major reform, bipartisan opposition to capital punishment is surfacing in the Commonwealth’s legislature. A group of legislators, led by Lebanon County Republican State Rep. Frank Ryan (pictured, left) and Philadelphia Democrat Chris Rabb (pictured, right), have prepared legislation to repeal Pennsylvania’s death penalty and are circulating the proposal for co-sponsorship. “The…

Four years after the racially motivated murders of nine African-American parishioners at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, 2015, a new book by Charleston Post and Courier reporter Jennifer Berry Hawes explores the aftermath of the killings and the extraordinary narrative of grace and forgiveness it produced. As a reporter for the Post and Courier, Hawes covered the story of white supremacist Dylann Roof’s murder of the churchgoers…

An Alabama woman who may have been raped by guards has given birth after being impregnated in the Coosa County jail while awaiting trial on capital murder charges. LaToni Daniel (pictured), an honorably discharged Army National Guard veteran who has been in pretrial custody without bail for more than seventeen months, had been prescribed sedatives in the prison for a supposed seizure disorder, and the medication prolonged her sleep. She first learned she was pregnant in December 2018 after…