Publications & Testimony

(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 for the ACLU of Northern…

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 with the many questions…

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 defense, removed a blood sample 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 death. The description…

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 to light. As I lie awake at night, mulling…

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 to use it. New documents, however, show that the drug was given to inmates as a sedative before…

On September 4, Oklahoma released a report from its investigation into the botched execution of Clayton Lockett. The review, which was conducted by investigators from the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, found several problems that may have contributed to the prolonged execution attempt on April 29. The execution was stopped by the warden, curtains were drawn in the chamber, but the inmate died afterwards, reportedly from the residues of the lethal drugs in his system. The state report found…

Baptist minister and civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton spoke in opposition to the death penalty in a recent debate at the Yale Political Union. Sharpton noted the dispropotion of blacks who are to sentenced to death compared to whites. He also raised concerns about the risk of executing the innocent, pointing out that many inmates have been exonerated from death row. He said the lower murder rates in states that do not have the death penalty indicate the death penalty does not deter murder.