Publications & Testimony

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 “law of parties.” Wood’s case garnered national media attention because he was sentenced to…

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 been executed. While King’s aggressive pursuit of death sentences contributed to his “larger than life” reputation, it also involved charges of misconduct…

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 2003 – 2007. He says, at the time “[w]e thought maybe it would be a…

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 wrongful executions. In an article in the Yale Law Journal Forum, lawyers Patrick Mulvaney and Katherine Chamblee of the Southern Center for Human Rights report that in Alabama, the only state that still permits judges to override a jury’s…

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 death penalty. From 2010 through 2015, nine death sentences were imposed in Clark County, while no one was sentenced to death in any other county in Nevada during that same period. In an analysis…

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 more punitive treatment, including being “more…

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, primarily in Mississippi and Louisiana. A two-part story by…

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 people to death.” The report, Too Broken to Fix, by Harvard University’s Fair Punishment Project, studied the nation’s 16 most prolific death-sentencing counties and found that Maricopa County exhibited systemic problems…

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 introduction which makes the opinion into a book and summarize what the other…

In a primary election described as reshaping the political landscape of Northeast Florida, the region voted in a landslide Tuesday to oust State Attorney Angela Corey (pictured) and Public Defender Matt Shirk. The pair’s controversial policies had made Duval County one of the most prolific death sentencing counties in the country and had led to national derision of its criminal justice system. Some legal experts touted Corey’s defeat by political newcomer Melissa Nelson as evidence of voter…