Publications & Testimony

Overturning the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for the second time, the United States Supreme Court ruled on February 19, 2019, that Texas death-row prisoner Bobby James Moore is intellectually disabled and may not be executed. In an unsigned opinion, the Supreme Court reversed the latest Texas appeals court decision that would have allowed Moore’s execution, saying the state court had relied on many of the same improper lay stereotypes and committed many of the same errors that had led the…

Bills to repeal and replace the death penalty with non-capital punishments have gained new traction across the United States in 2019 as a result of opposition to the death penalty among ideologically conservative legislators. That movement – buoyed by fiscal and pro-life conservatives, conservative law-reform advocates, and the deepening involvement of the Catholic Church in death-penalty abolition – has led to unprecedented successes in numerous houses of state legislatures and moved repeal…

Committee on Criminal Justice and Public Safety, New Hampshire House of Representatives: Testimony on HB 455 – Changing the penalty for capital murder to life imprisonment without the possibility for parole by Robert Brett Dunham, Executive Director, Death Penalty Information Center (Concord, February 19, 2019). Exhibits to Mr. Dunham’s testimony can be accessed here.

A February 4, 2019 article in the criminal justice newsletter, The Appeal, features the case of Demetrius Howard, a California prisoner sentenced to death for a crime in which he didn’t kill anyone. Howard was sentenced to death in 1995 for his participation in a robbery in which another man, Mitchell Funches, shot and killed Sherry Collins. Howard was never accused of firing a shot and he has consistently maintained that he neither expected nor intended that anyone would be killed. But under…

As execution drugs have become more difficult for states to lawfully obtain and problematic executions have become more frequent, states have expanded their efforts to shield their execution-related activities from public scrutiny. In the latest episode of Discussions with DPIC, Robin Konrad, former DPIC Director of Research and Special Projects, joins Executive Director Robert Dunham and current Director of Research and Special Projects Ngozi Ndulue to discuss DPIC’s November 2018 report…

The U.S. Supreme Court has found itself in the crossfire of harsh criticism from across the political spectrum after its intervention in a death penalty case allowed Alabama to execute a Muslim prisoner without providing him access to a religious adviser. Evangelical Christians and Catholic Bishops joined editorial boards and commentators from the New York Times to the National Review in condemning the Court’s 5 – 4 decision permitting the execution of Domineque Ray (pictured) on February 7…

Colorado Governor Jared Polis (pictured) has said he will “strongly consider” commuting the death sentences of the three men on the state’s death row if the state abolishes the death penalty. In a February 7, 2019 interview on Colorado Public Radio, Polis told Colorado Matters host Ryan Warner, “if the legislature sends us a bill to eliminate the death penalty in Colorado, I would sign that bill … [and] I would certainly take that as a strong indication that those who are currently on death row…

Georgia death-row prisoner Keith Tharpe (pictured, left) and Oklahoma death-row prisoner Julius Jones (pictured, right) are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to grant them new trials after evidence showed that white jurors who described the defendants with racist slurs participated in deciding their cases. The involvement of the racist jurors, the prisoners say, violated their Sixth Amendment rights to impartial juries. A juror in Tharpe’s trial gave a sworn affidavit years after voting to convict…

In a 5 – 4 decision that Justice Elena Kagan characterized as “profoundly wrong,” the U.S. Supreme Court on February 7, 2019 permitted Alabama to execute a Muslim death-row prisoner, Domineque Ray (pictured), who had claimed that the state’s execution process discriminated against him because of his religion. Without explanation, the Court asserted that Ray had waited too long to challenge a provision in Alabama’s execution protocol that made a Christian chaplain part of the state’s execution…

Clemency, a film exploring the psychological toll of the death penalty, has been awarded the U.S. Grand Jury Prize for Drama at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival on February 2, 2019. The movie, written and directed by Nigerian-American filmmaker Chinonye Chukwu, tells the story of prison warden Bernadine Williams (portrayed by Alfre Woodard) as she prepares to oversee her 12^th execution in the aftermath of a botched execution. Chukwu said she was inspired to write the script after the…