Publications & Testimony

In The Birth of American Law: An Italian Philosopher and the American Revolution, his­to­ri­an John Bessler reveals the pro­found influ­ence that the Italian thinker, Cesare Beccaria, had on the con­sti­tu­tion­al founders of the United States, includ­ing George Washington and John Adams. Beccaria’s best­selling book, On Crimes and Punishments, argued against tor­ture and the death penal­ty, say­ing only pun­ish­ments proven absolute­ly nec­es­sary should be…

A new appeal filed on behalf of Mississippi death row inmate Eddie Howard, Jr. pre­sent­ed DNA evi­dence that calls into ques­tion bite-mark evi­dence used to con­vict him in 1992. At Howard’s tri­al, Dr. Michael West, a Mississippi den­tist who had tes­ti­fied as a foren­sic expert in numer­ous cas­es, said Howard’s teeth matched bite marks found on the mur­der vic­tim. The vic­tim had been buried for three days and exhumed before West exam­ined her. He said he found three…

On September 11, four news orga­ni­za­tions filed suit in fed­er­al court chal­leng­ing Pennsylvania​’s secre­cy about the source of its lethal injec­tion drugs as a vio­la­tion of the first amend­ment rights of the media and the cit­i­zens of Pennsylvania. The suit was filed by the Guardian, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Philadelphia City Paper in advance of the exe­cu­tion of Hubert Michael, which had been sched­uled for…

(Click to enlarge graph) A Field Poll of vot­ers in California found that sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment has reached its low­est lev­el since 1965. Only 56% of respon­dents said they favored keep­ing the death penal­ty, down from 69% in 2011. Support for the death penal­ty among Californians peaked in the mid-1980s at 83%. Some of the strongest oppo­si­tion to keep­ing the death penal­ty came from vot­ers under 30, African Americans, and Democrats. Daisy Vieyra, a spokesperson…

The high­ly acclaimed resource on the death penal­ty — ​“America’s Experiment with Capital Punishment” — has just been released in its Third Edition. This com­pendi­um of essays by experts cov­ers the his­to­ry, pol­i­tics, and law of the death penal­ty, as well as relat­ed issues, such as inno­cence, intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty, and race. DPIC’s Executive Director, Richard Dieter, con­tributed a chap­ter on the costs of the death penal­ty. The edi­tors encour­age read­ers to grapple…

Today, along with our news update, we are mak­ing a spe­cial request of our read­ers. Please take a moment to con­sid­er the val­ue of the infor­ma­tion we pro­vide, and make a dona­tion to sup­port DPIC’s work. By con­tribut­ing, you help us expand our efforts to pro­vide the most up-to-date infor­ma­tion on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and pro­duce inno­v­a­tive resources for jour­nal­ists, edu­ca­tors, legal pro­fes­sion­als, and oth­ers. News sto­ries cit­ing our infor­ma­tion appear in the media on a dai­ly basis and in every…

A new report from the National Institute of Justice exam­ines ways to reduce and pre­vent errors, such as the wrong­ful con­vic­tion of an inno­cent per­son. The report pro­pos­es ​“sen­tinel event reviews” — the exam­i­na­tion of mis­takes with a view of find­ing sys­temic prob­lems. The report uses the death penal­ty exon­er­a­tion of John Thompson in Louisiana to illus­trate its goal: ​“In Connick [v. Thompson], the tri­al pros­e­cu­tor with­held crime lab results from the…

A 2014 study by Professors Cynthia Willis-Esqueda (pic­tured) of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) and Russ K.E. Espinoza of California State University found that white jurors were more like­ly to rec­om­mend a death sen­tence for Latino defen­dants than for white defen­dants in California. Researchers gave case descrip­tions to 500 white and Latino peo­ple who had report­ed for jury duty in south­ern California, then asked them to choose a sen­tence of life with­out parole or…

In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Kenneth Rose, an attor­ney for the recent­ly freed Henry McCollum, expressed his frus­tra­tions with the death-penal­ty sys­tem that allowed such mis­takes to hap­pen in the first place: ​“I am angry that we live in a world where two dis­abled boys can have their lives stolen from them, where cops can lie and intim­i­date with impuni­ty, where inno­cent peo­ple can be con­demned to die and where injus­tice is so dif­fi­cult to bring…

An inves­ti­ga­tion by St. Louis Public Radio has revealed that Missouri has been admin­is­ter­ing Midazolam to inmates pri­or to their exe­cu­tion since November 2013. Midazolam is a seda­tive that was used in all three of this year’s most seri­ous­ly botched exe­cu­tions in Ohio, Oklahoma, and Arizona. Missouri offi­cials had tes­ti­fied ear­li­er that the state had not used Midazolam in exe­cu­tions and did not plan…