Publications & Testimony

For the first time in two decades, Oklahoma will go at least two years with­out an exe­cu­tion. As part of an agree­ment in a fed­er­al law­suit brought by the state’s death row pris­on­ers, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt (pic­tured) has said the state will not request exe­cu­tion dates for at least five months after the state adopts a new exe­cu­tion pro­to­col. Because of this, when the Oklahoma Board of Corrections met on September 13, 2016, the…

Today, DPIC launch­es a new pod­cast series,​“Discussions With DPIC,” which will fea­ture month­ly, unscript­ed con­ver­sa­tions with death penal­ty experts on a wide vari­ety of top­ics. The inau­gur­al episode fea­tures a con­ver­sa­tion between Texas Defender Services staff attor­ney Kate Black (pic­tured) and DPIC host Anne Holsinger, who dis­cuss the case of Jeffery Wood and Texas’ unusu­al legal doc­trine known as the…

Roger King, a for­mer pros­e­cu­tor in Philadelphia who at one point was respon­si­ble for 20% of all the death sen­tences imposed in Pennsylvania, died of kid­ney can­cer on August 24. When King retired in 2008, he held the record for most death sen­tences obtained by a sin­gle Pennsylvania pros­e­cu­tor. None of the men he sent to death row has ever…

In a recent com­men­tary in the Columbus Dispatch, for­mer Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro (pic­tured) crit­i­cized the state’s death penal­ty as​“a bro­ken sys­tem that cur­rent­ly serves only the inter­est of Ohio pros­e­cu­tors” and said that keep­ing​“the death penal­ty is just not worth it any more.” As a state leg­is­la­tor, Petro helped write Ohio’s cur­rent death-penal­­ty law and he over­saw eigh­teen exe­cu­tions as Attorney General from…

New data sug­gests that states that cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing statutes that per­mit judges to impose death sen­tences by over­rid­ing jury rec­om­men­da­tions for life or after juries have returned non-unan­i­­mous rec­om­men­da­tions for death may increase the risk of…

The geo­graph­ic arbi­trari­ness, high rates of offi­cial mis­con­duct, racial dis­crim­i­na­tion, and poor defense rep­re­sen­ta­tion char­ac­ter­is­tic of out­lier juris­dic­tions that dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly seek and impose the death penal­ty in the United States are all present in Clark County, Nevada​’s admin­is­tra­tion of the…

Calling racial bias in the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty​“an undis­put­ed fact,” the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators (NHCSL), a group of 320 Hispanic leg­is­la­tors, has passed a res­o­lu­tion urg­ing leg­isla­tive action in all state and fed­er­al juris­dic­tions to repeal the death penal­ty across the United States. The leg­is­la­tors note that the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem sub­jects​“Black, Latino, Native Americans, and all peo­ple of col­or” to…

Attorneys for Mississippi death row pris­on­er Eddie Lee Howard (pic­tured) are seek­ing to prove his inno­cence and chal­leng­ing the ques­tion­able expert bite mark tes­ti­mo­ny that per­suad­ed jurors to con­vict him and sen­tence him to death in 1992. As part of the attack on that evi­dence, Howard’s lawyers recent­ly deposed Michael West, the dis­cred­it­ed foren­sic odon­tol­o­gist who tes­ti­fied against Howard and many oth­er defen­dants in the 1990s,…

Maricopa County, Arizona imposed 28 death sen­tences between 2010 and 2015 and, as described in a BuzzFeed news analy­sis of a new report on out­lier death penal­ty prac­tices,​“stands out for its stark exam­ples of the prob­lems found across the coun­ties that most often sentence…

In a new book, Against the Death Penalty, Professor John Bessler of the University of Baltimore School of Law presents Justice Stephen Breyer’s his­toric dis­sent in Glossip v. Gross, which ques­tioned the con­tin­u­ing con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the United States, in a new for­mat intend­ed to make the opin­ion more acces­si­ble to a broad audi­ence.​“I tried to con­tex­tu­al­ize the opin­ion by doing a longer…