Publications & Testimony

A recent op-ed by for­mer Texas Governor Mark White (pic­tured) and for­mer Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Gerald Kogan crit­i­cized a recent­ly passed North Carolina law that impos­es secre­cy on the source of lethal injec­tion drugs and removes exe­cu­tion pro­ce­dures from pub­lic review and com­ment. The authors said the new law will only pro­long lit­i­ga­tion, rather than end­ing North Carolina’s hold on exe­cu­tions, as intend­ed. The op-ed also…

A new study of tri­als in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, revealed that poten­tial jurors who were black were much more like­ly to be struck from juries than non-blacks. The results were con­sis­tent with find­ings from Alabama, North Carolina, and oth­er parts of Louisiana, high­light­ing an issue that will be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme…

DPIC’s com­plete set of 50 facts about the death penal­ty is now avail­able. The 50 facts pro­vide an excel­lent intro­duc­tion to a vari­ety of death penal­ty top­ics, includ­ing costs, deter­rence, race, inno­cence, and more. Each fact is pre­sent­ed in graph­i­cal form, with links to fur­ther infor­ma­tion avail­able on our 50 Facts page. The series is also avail­able on Facebook and Twitter, and we…

On August 6, North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory signed a law that removed the require­ment that a physi­cian be present at exe­cu­tions and shroud­ed in secre­cy many ele­ments of the lethal injec­tion process, includ­ing the spe­cif­ic drugs to be used and the sup­pli­ers of those drugs. By elim­i­nat­ing the physi­­cian-par­tic­i­­pa­­tion require­ment, the law attempt­ed to remove a legal hur­dle that has halt­ed exe­cu­tions in North Carolina since 2006. Two major state…

The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled on August 13 that the death penal­ty vio­lates the state con­sti­tu­tion. In the 4 – 3 deci­sion in State v. Santiago, the Court said that, because of the prospec­tive repeal of the death penal­ty in 2012 and​“the state’s near total mora­to­ri­um on car­ry­ing out exe­cu­tions over the past fifty-five years, cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment has become incom­pat­i­ble with con­tem­po­rary stan­dards of decency in…

A new film,​“Bloodsworth: An Innocent Man,” pre­mieres on August 13. The movie, described as a​“doc­u­men­tary mem­oir,” tells the sto­ry of Kirk Bloodsworth, an inno­cent man sen­tenced to death in Maryland who became the first death row pris­on­er in the United States to be exon­er­at­ed by DNA evi­dence. Bloodsworth was con­vict­ed and sent to death row in 1985 for the sex­u­al assault and mur­der of a 9‑year-old girl. He won a new tri­al as a result of…

Changes in who is District Attorney have caused a dra­mat­ic decline in death sen­tences in 3 coun­ties that his­tor­i­cal­ly have pro­duced a dis­pro­por­tion­ate num­ber of death sen­tences in the United States, accord­ing to a sto­ry from The Marshall Project. Harris County (Houston), Texas, Oklahoma County, Oklahoma, and Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania were all among the 2% of coun­ties that account­ed for 56% of inmates on death row as of 2013, but the…

A report by University of Virginia Law Professor Brandon L. Garrett describes the effects of false con­fes­sions in cas­es in which DNA evi­dence lat­er led to an exon­er­a­tion. Garrett reports that half of the 20 death row inmates who were exon­er­at­ed by DNA test­ing had false­ly con­fessed to the crime. He uses the recent exon­er­a­tions of intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled defen­dants Leon Brown and Henry McCollum in North Carolina to illus­trate the prob­lem:​“The police…

On August 7, a jury in Aurora, Colorado, sen­tenced James Holmes to life in prison with­out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole for the 2012 movie the­ater shoot­ing that killed 12 peo­ple and injured dozens more. The jury said they could not reach a unan­i­mous deci­sion on Holmes’ sen­tence, an out­come that results in a sen­tence of life…

On August 6, 1890, New York exe­cut­ed William Kemmler. It was the first time ever a state used the elec­tric chair to car­ry out an exe­cu­tion. Proponents of elec­tro­cu­tion — includ­ing Thomas Edison — tout­ed the new method as quick, effec­tive, pain­less, and humane: the same argu­ments lat­er used by leg­is­la­tors to sup­port lethal injec­tion and exe­cu­tion by nitro­gen gas. In May 1890, the U.S. Supreme Court…