Publications & Testimony

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…

Whose interests does a lawyer represent, the capital defendant whose life is at stake or the abusive father paying for his defense? Alabama death-row prisoner Nicholas Acklin (pictured) is seeking U.S. Supreme Court review of that issue because he alleges that the lawyer who represented him at trial had a financial conflict of interest that affected the way he represented Acklin in the penalty phase of his capital trial. Nick Acklin’s father, Theodis Acklin, paid for the legal services of…

Death-row exoneree Alfred Dewayne Brown (pictured) was declared “actually innocent” by Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg on March 1, 2019, making Brown eligible for state compensation for the time he spent wrongfully imprisoned on Texas’ death row. “My obligation as an advocate is not to tell people what they want to hear but to tell them the truth,” Ogg said at a press conference. “Alfred Brown was wrongfully convicted through prosecutorial misconduct.” Brown was freed in 2015, ten years…

The United States Supreme Court has reversed a decision of the Alabama state courts that would have permitted the execution of Vernon Madison (pictured), a death-row prisoner whose severe dementia has left him with no memory of the crime for which he was sentenced to death and compromised his understanding of why he was to be executed. The Alabama courts had narrowly construed the Supreme Court’s past rulings that prohibited the execution of prisoners who had become mentally incompetent…

Texas is scheduled to execute Billie Wayne Coble (pictured) on February 28, 2019, despite court findings that two expert witnesses who testified for the prosecution gave “problematic” and “fabricated” testimony at his trial. Coble was sentenced to death in 1990 and resentenced in 2008 after his original sentence was overturned as a result of constitutionally deficient jury instructions. At his resentencing, the issue of future dangerousness presented a serious problem for prosecutors. Under…

During February DPIC posts infographics on race and the death penalty on our Facebook and Twitter pages. View our 2019 Black History Month infographics collection here. View our 2018 Black History Month infographics collection here. View our 2017 Black History Month infographics collection below: 2017 Black History Month Infographic Series Saying that “racial bias In the criminal justice system, including the death penalty and its application, is an undisputed fact,” the National Hispanic…

An estimated 1,500 government officials and representatives of non-governmental organizations from more than 140 countries gathered in Brussels, Belgium on February 26, 2019 for the opening of the Seventh World Congress Against the Death Penalty. The World Congress – organized by the Ensemble Contre la Peine de Mort and the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty – is the world’s leading convocation on capital punishment. The four-day meeting formally opened on February 27 with a ceremony in…