Publications & Testimony

On June 21, 2019, the United States Supreme Court vacated Curtis Flowers’ conviction in a 7 – 2 decision. For more information about the opinion, read DPIC’s summary here. See also Supreme Court Vacates Conviction in Mississippi Death Penalty Case Finding Race Discrimination in Jury Selection. Pre-Oral Argument Summary Mississippi death-row prisoner Curtis Giovanni Flowers has been tried six times for a quadruple murder in Winona, Mississippi. His first three trials were reversed because of…

In October 2018, the Washington Supreme Court unanimously struck down the state’s death penalty, finding that it had been “imposed in an arbitrary and racially biased manner.” In reaching its decision in State v. Gregory, the court relied upon a study of twenty-five years of Washington State capital prosecutions that demonstrated that Washington juries were 4.5 times more likely to impose a death sentence on a black defendant than on a white defendant in a similar case. The authors of that…

California Governor Gavin Newsom on March 13, 2019 declared a moratorium on executions in the state with the nation’s largest death row. Newsom implemented the moratorium through an executive order granting reprieves to the 737 prisoners currently on California’s death row. He also announced that he was withdrawing the state’s execution protocol — the administrative plan by which executions are carried out — and was closing down the state’s execution chamber. In his executive order imposing the…

In the past few years, the governors of California, Pennsylvania, Washington, Colorado, and Oregon have put a halt to executions in their states because of problems in the death penalty system. Below are some of the reasons they gave for for their actions. Governor Gavin Newsom, California, March 13, 2019 “Our death penalty system has been, by all measures, a failure. It has discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, black and brown, or can’t afford expensive legal representation.

Prosecutors in separate capital cases in Indiana, Florida, and Texas have dropped pursuit of the death penalty in order to end notoriously lengthy delays and facilitate healing for the victims’ families. On March 8, 2019, St. Joseph County, Indiana prosecutors agreed to a plea deal instead of a third death-penalty trial for Wayne Kubsch (pictured) at the request of the victims’ family. Kubsch was initially sentenced to death in 2000 and received the death penalty a second time in 2005, but both…

After controversial executions raised questions of government competence or misconduct, legislatures in two states have responded with bills taking sharply different approaches to the questions of government accountability and public oversight. Following an execution in which Nebraska Department of Corrections officials closed the curtain on fourteen crucial minutes of the execution of Carey Dean Moore, the Nebraska Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony on March 7, 2019 on a bill that…

By an overwhelming 279 – 88 margin, a veto-proof majority of the New Hampshire House of Representatives voted on March 7, 2019 to repeal the state’s death penalty. Demonstrating strong bipartisan support that garnered the backing of 56 more legislators than an identical repeal bill received in April 2018, the vote ended speculation as to how the reconstituted chamber would respond to repeal. 93 of the 400 representatives in the state house who participated in the vote in 2018 did not seek…

A new study of fourteen years of Pennsylvania murder convictions has documented a sharp decline in county prosecutors’ use of capital punishment across the Commonwealth. After examining the court files of 4,184 murder convictions from 2004 to 2017, the Allentown Morning Call found that Pennsylvania prosecutors sought the death penalty at more than triple the rate (3.3) at the start of the study period than they did fourteen years later — a drop of more than 70%. In 2004, the paper reported…

Judiciary Committee, Nebraska Unicameral Legislature: Testimony on LB 238 – A Bill Relating to Witnessing Executions by Robert Brett Dunham, Executive Director, Death Penalty Information Center (Lincoln, March 7, 2019)

For the first time in more than a decade, a jury in Wake County, North Carolina has sentenced a defendant to death. On March 4, 2019, a capital sentencing jury voted to impose the death penalty upon Seaga Edward Gillard, convicted of the double murder of a pregnant prostitute and her boyfriend, who was assisting her in her business. It was the county’s tenth death-penalty trial since 2008, but juries had rejected a death sentence in each of the previous nine cases. Prosecutors portrayed the…