Publications & Testimony

For the first time in more than a quarter century, fewer than 2,500 prisoners across the United States now face active death sentences. According to the latest Death Row USA national census by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), released in early September 2018, 2,743 people were on death rows in 32 states and the U.S. federal and military death rows on April 1, 2018. That total includes 249 people who were previously sentenced to death but face the possibility of a capital resentencing after a…

A landmark article in the Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy provides a ​“compilation of milestones in the American experience with capital punishment,” tracking more than 400 years of the ​“inglorious experience with capital punishment” in what is now the United States. Authors Rob Warden (pictured, left), Executive Director Emeritus at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law’s Bluhm Legal Clinic Center on Wrongful Convictions, and Daniel Lennard (pictured, right), a lawyer at…

In a period of less than one week, four former death-row prisoners in four separate states learned that they no longer face execution, contributing to the continuing decline in the number of people on death rows across the U.S. The result of the unrelated court proceedings — a resentencing hearing in Pennsylvania, a non-capital grand jury indictment in Louisiana, a prosecutor’s decision to drop death in Indiana, and a court ruling on intellectual disability in Alabama — illustrate the ongoing…

Four years after intellectually disabled brothers Henry McCollum and Leon Brown were exonerated of the 1983 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in North Carolina, jurors in McCollum’s case met with members of his defense team and reflected on how they sentenced an innocent man to death. In a September 6 op-ed in the Raleigh News & Observer, Kristin Collins — Associate Director of Public Information for North Carolina’s Center for Death Penalty Litigation and a former News & Observer…

Billy Ray Irick (pictured) was tortured to death during his August 9, 2018 execution in Tennessee, according to one the nation’s leading anesthesiologists. In an affidavit submitted to the Tennessee Supreme Court on September 6 as part of an appeal filed by state death-row prisoners challenging Tennessee’s execution process, anesthesiologist Dr. David Lubarsky, the Vice Chancellor for Human Health Sciences at the University of California-Davis Health, said Irick was not properly anesthetized…

In the latest episode of our Discussions with DPIC podcast, Keelah Williams (pictured), assistant professor of psychology at Hamilton College in New York, joins DPIC executive director Robert Dunham to discuss the implications of new research on the death penalty and resource scarcity. ​“Resource scarcity” is a concept from evolutionary psychology that examines individual and social responses to environmental conditions in which resources are limited. “[E]cological variables can affect our…

Incoming United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet (pictured), has condemned the mass trial of more than 700 protesters in a Cairo, Egypt, criminal court, in which 75 defendants were sentenced to death. The court also imposed life sentences on 47 others on September 8 and sentenced another 612 defendants to prison terms of 15, 10, or 5 years. The defendants faced charges ranging from ​“illegal gathering” to murder and attempted murder arising from their involvement in…

The Louisiana Supreme Court has unanimously overturned the conviction of death-row prisoner Brian Douglas Horn (pictured), after Horn’s lawyer conceded — over Horn’s explicit objection — that his client had killed and also may have molested 12-year-old Justin Bloxom. The September 7, 2018 ruling is the latest fallout in Louisiana from the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision earlier this year in McCoy v. Louisiana, which declared that such concessions violate a defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to…

Defense attorneys for Sayfullo Saipov (pictured), the man accused of killing eight people by driving a truck onto a Manhattan bike path on October 31, 2017, have asked a New York federal district court to bar the U.S. government from seeking the death penalty against Saipov. Arguing that President Donald Trump has unconstitutionally injected ​“nakedly political considerations” into the Department of Justice’s charging decision, Saipov’s lawyers on September 6, 2018, filed a motion before Judge…

Filming for the movie adaptation of Bryan Stevenson’s best-selling book, Just Mercy, began August 27, 2018 in Montgomery, Alabama. The film will feature Michael B. Jordan (Creed, Black Panther) as Stevenson and Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx (Ray, Django Unchained) as wrongfully convicted death-row prisoner Walter McMillian. Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, represented McMillian — a Black man framed for the 1986 murder of an 18-year-old White woman in Monroeville, Alabama — in…