Publications & Testimony

In this month’s podcast episode of *12:01: The Death Penalty* *in Context*, DPI’s Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with Professors Craig Haney and Frank Baumgartner, and DPI’s Staff Attorney Leah Roemer about the legacy of the US Supreme Court’s decision in *Roper v. Simmons* and the legal and scientific landscape surrounding the use of the death penalty for young adults ages 18 – 20. Professors Baumgartner and Haney, along with fellow researcher Karen Steele,…

In commemoration of the 20^th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision ending the juvenile death penalty, the Death Penalty Information Center (DPI) today released a new report: Immature Minds in a “Maturing Society”: Roper v. Simmons at 20, detailing growing support that individuals ages 18, 19, and 20 should receive the same age-appropriate considerations that juveniles now receive in death penalty cases. [T]here is no bright line regarding brain development nor is there…

Jeffrey Hutchinson is scheduled to be executed in Florida on May 1, 2025, despite a longstanding mental illness and his attorney’s claim that he is mentally incompetent. On April 24, 2025, attorneys for the Gulf War veteran filed a motion in Bradford County Circuit Court seeking a stay of his scheduled execution and requesting an evidentiary hearing to assess their client’s competency. Mr. Hutchinson has suffered from a delusional disorder for decades, with a persistent delusion that his…

On April 24, 2025, Louisiana District Court Judge Alvin Sharp set aside Jimmie Duncan’s first-degree murder conviction and death sentence. Mr. Duncan was sentenced to death for the 1993 death of his girlfriend’s toddler largely based on faulty bite mark evidence. Judge Sharp, in a decision that came after a September 2024 evidentiary hearing, held that expert testimony presented during this hearing demonstrated the bite mark analysis used against Mr. Duncan is “no longer valid” and “not…

The Supreme Court has consistently held that “death is different”: the “qualitative difference between death and other penalties calls for a greater degree of reliability when the death sentence is imposed.” As a result, capital defendants pursue a series of mandatory and discretionary appeals to ensure that mistakes of constitutional significance are identified and corrected. However, death-sentenced prisoners in Louisiana recently argued that the state issued execution warrants before they…

On April 21, 2025, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis, 88, died following a series of health failures. Pope Francis, the first Roman Catholic pontiff from Latin America, was an outspoken advocate for abolition of the death penalty. In August 2018, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis formally changed the official Catholic Church teaching on the death penalty, calling the practice “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” adding that it is “inadmissible” in all cases.

On April 11, 2025, Judge Colonel Matthew McCall ruled that confessions elicited from Ammar al-Baluchi, accused of conspiring in the September 11^th terrorism attacks, were the result of torture carried out by the CIA and as a result cannot be used against Mr. al-Baluchi in any legal proceeding. According to Col. McCall, Mr. al-Baluchi involuntarily incriminated himself in 2007 after extensive “psychological conditioning” through torture and abuse during his detention at the CIA’s overseas…

On April 10, 2025, attorneys for Tennessee death row prisoners Oscar Smith and Byron Black called on Governor Bill Lee to issue a temporary reprieve in their cases. In their letter, the attorneys ask Gov. Lee “to pause all executions in Tennessee until March 1, 2026,” to permit a pending case challenging the constitutionality of the state’s new pentobarbital lethal injection procedure to be decided. In late December 2024, the Tennessee Department of Corrections (TDOC) completed a multi-year…