Publications & Testimony

2018 was a record-low year for death-penalty usage in the United States, as eighteen death-penalty states set or matched records for the fewest new death sentences imposed in the modern history of U.S. capital punishment. (Click here to enlarge map.) Thirty-five U.S. states — including sixteen that authorized capital punishment in 2018 — did not impose any death sentences in 2018, while California and Pennsylvania, which collectively account for nearly one-third of the nation’s death-row…

The R Street Institute, a Washington-based policy think tank, has joined the growing number of conservative voices advocating for death-penalty abolition. In a commentary in the November/​December 2018 issue of The American Conservative, the institute’s criminal justice and civil liberties policy director Arthur Rizer (pictured, left) and its Southeast region director Marc Hyden (pictured, right) argue that ​“the closer conservatism remains to its core values, the more credibility it brings to…

Empowered by the results of the November 2018 mid-term elections, legislatures in at least four states are poised to renew efforts to repeal their states’ death-penalty statutes or drastically reduce the circumstances in which capital punishment is available. State legislative and gubernatorial elections in Colorado, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Oregon have redefined the local political landscape in 2019 in ways that death-penalty abolitionists say have made those bills more likely to succeed.

Death-row exoneree Ron Keine (pictured) reflects on spending the holidays on death row: It is Christmas time on the row. At night I can hear the muffled sounds of a grown man crying in his pillow. His trusty pillow which is his only safe confidant as emotions are seen as weakness in prison and can even get you killed. Everywhere in the world it is a time for happiness, a time to rejoice, but here on death row it is depression and sadness in the very souls of us death row denizens. I miss the…

In the latest podcast episode of Discussions with DPIC, members of the DPIC staff discuss key themes from the 2018 Year End Report. Robert Dunham, Ngozi Ndulue, and Anne Holsinger delve into the major death-penalty trends and news items of the year, including the ​“extended trend” of generational lows in death sentencing and executions, election results that indicate the decline will likely continue, and the possible impact of Pope Francis’s change to Catholic teaching on capital punishment.

Florida courts have refused death-row prisoners access to DNA testing seventy times, denying 19 men – eight of whom have been executed – any testing at all and preventing nine others from obtaining testing of additional evidence or more advanced DNA testing after initial tests were inconclusive. For a six-part investigative series, Blood and truth: The lingering case of Tommy Zeigler and how Florida fights DNA testing, Tampa Bay Times Pulitzer-prize winning investigative journalist Leonora…

In March 2018, Alabama enacted a new law authorizing the use of nitrogen gas as an alternative method of execution. Although lethal injection remained the primary method of execution, the law provided condemned prisoners a limited opportunity to designate nitrogen asphyxiation (hypoxia) as the means of their death. The availability of execution by nitrogen gas led to a July 2018 settlement of a federal lawsuit Alabama’s death-row prisoners had filed that had challenged the constitutionality of…

With the support of a record 120 nations, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution on December 17, 2018 calling for a worldwide moratorium on the death penalty. The resolution expressed ​“deep concern” over the use of the death penalty and urged those countries that continue to use it to take action to ensure that death sentences are not the product of discriminatory or arbitrary laws or practices. The moratorium resolution, proposed this year by Brazil and co-sponsored by 83…

Six former governors have urged California Governor Jerry Brown (pictured) to ​“be courageous in leadership” and grant clemency to the 740 men and women on California’s death row before he leaves office on January 7, 2019. In a December 13 op-ed in the New York Times, the former governors — Ohio’s Richard Celeste, Oregon’s John Kitzhaber, Maryland’s Martin O’Malley, New Mexico’s Bill Richardson and Toney Anaya, and Illinois’s Pat Quinn — wrote that ​“Mr. Brown has the power to commute the sentences…

The long-term decline of death-penalty use in the U.S. continued in 2018, as a twentieth state abolished capital punishment and executions and new death sentences remained near generational lows. On October 11, the Washington State Supreme Court struck down the state’s death penalty, finding that it was imposed arbitrarily and in a racially discriminatory manner. Washington became the eighth state to legislatively or judicially abolish the death penalty since 2007. According to the Death…