Publications & Testimony

The num­ber of peo­ple sen­tenced to death or fac­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a death sen­tence in pend­ing cap­i­tal retri­al or resen­tenc­ing pro­ceed­ings con­tin­ued its more than two-decade decline in the third quar­ter of last year, accord­ing to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) Summer 2022 quar­ter­ly cen­sus of death rows across the United…

UPDATE 2: On June 2, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit lift­ed the stay that had been imposed by the U.S. District Court, say­ing that the low­er court did not have juris­dic­tion to order the…

On May 11, attor­neys for Robert Roberson, a death-sen­tenced pris­on­er in Texas, filed a peti­tion for cer­tio­rari to the Supreme Court ask­ing it to reverse the deci­sion of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA). Mr. Roberson’s con­vic­tion for the mur­der of his daugh­ter Nikki was based on the so-called ​“Shaken Baby Syndrome” which has now been debunked by new sci­en­tif­ic and med­ical evi­dence. The TCCA dis­re­gard­ed this and oth­er evi­dence that showed his daughter’s death was attrib­ut­able to…

According to an annu­al death penal­ty report by Amnesty International, 2022 saw the high­est num­ber of record­ed exe­cu­tions since 2017, pri­mar­i­ly due to increas­es in just a hand­ful of coun­tries in the Middle East and North Africa. The report also not­ed a slight decrease in the num­ber of new­ly imposed death sen­tences world­wide. In its report, Amnesty says use of the death penal­ty in sev­er­al coun­tries con­tin­ues to vio­late inter­na­tion­al law with pub­lic exe­cu­tions, exe­cu­tions of juve­niles or those…

Over a decade ago, four audio tapes and hun­dreds of exe­cu­tion doc­u­ments were donat­ed to the Library of the University of Virginia by a for­mer Virginia cor­rec­tion­al employ­ee. National Public Radio (NPR) aired excerpts from those long-hid­den tapes in January 2023. Shortly there­after, a rep­re­sen­ta­tive from the Virginia Department of Corrections (VDOC) then request­ed the return of all the mate­ri­als. NPR now reports that only two of the six box­es of mate­r­i­al remain avail­able for view­ing at the…

The Death Penalty Information Center is pleased to announce that Robin M. Maher has joined the orga­ni­za­tion as Executive Director, effec­tive May 15, 2023. Most recent­ly, Ms. Maher was Senior Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Access to Justice. Ms. Maher pre­vi­ous­ly worked in the fed­er­al defend­er sys­tem and at the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, and has more than twen­ty years’ expe­ri­ence train­ing lawyers and judges in the United States and around the world. She was…

Occasionally, DPIC dis­cov­ers an old­er case involv­ing an exon­er­a­tion from death row and adds that case to the DPIC Innocence List. Joe Cota Morales was con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death in Arizona in 1976 and was exon­er­at­ed in 1981. He has now been added to the Innocence List, bring­ing the total num­ber of death-row exon­er­a­tions to…

On May 9, 2023, the Ohio Senate Judiciary Committee held its first hear­ing on Senate Bill 101 that would abol­ish the state’s death penal­ty. The co-spon­sors of the bill, Senate Democratic Leader Nickie Antonio (D‑Lakewood) and Senator Stephen Huffman (R‑Tipp City), argued in favor of the bill’s pas­sage and not­ed that more than one-third of Ohio’s sen­a­tors have signed on as…

DPIC’s High School Curriculum on the Death Penalty, which was orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed in coop­er­a­tion with Michigan State University’s Communications Technology Laboratory in 2001, has been updat­ed and inte­grat­ed into DPIC’s main web­site. This resource cov­ers death penal­ty his­to­ry, legal pro­ce­dures, argu­ments for and against cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, and nar­ra­tives of real capital…

In an arti­cle for the University of Oxford Death Penalty Research Unit, Professor John Bessler dis­cuss­es whether the use of the death penal­ty should be clas­si­fied as tor­ture under the norms of inter­na­tion­al law. Bessler argues that since psy­cho­log­i­cal tor­ture is pro­hib­it­ed under the most fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples of inter­na­tion­al law (jus cogens norms) and since death threats are a form of psy­cho­log­i­cal tor­ture, then gov­ern­men­tal death threats as part of the death penal­ty are torturous…