Publications & Testimony

A forth­com­ing book by John D. Bessler, ​“Cruel and Unusual: The American Death Penalty and the Founders’ Eighth Amendment,” dis­cuss­es the his­to­ry of the Eighth Amendment and the coun­try’s founders’ views on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. While the con­ven­tion­al wis­dom is that the founders were avid death penal­ty sup­port­ers, Bessler’s exam­i­na­tion shows they had con­flict­ing and ambiva­lent views on the sub­ject. Bessler ana­lyzes the U.S. Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment case law and…

The lat­est edi­tion of the Death Penalty Information Center’s series of pod­casts, DPIC on the Issues, is now avail­able for lis­ten­ing or down­load­ing. This pod­cast – the 16^th in the series – dis­cuss­es the lit­tle-under­stood world of death row, explor­ing the con­di­tions on the row and the length of time pris­on­ers spend there. The pod­cast dis­cuss­es some of the legal issues that have arisen regard­ing the extend­ed depri­va­tion and iso­la­tion com­mon to death rows around the country,…

The Death Penalty Information Center is pleased to offer a new page illus­trat­ing the geog­ra­phy of the death penal­ty–Executions by County. This page shows the top 15 coun­ties in the U.S. mea­sured by the num­ber of exe­cu­tions since 1976 that emanat­ed from these coun­ties. As revealed on the map, a small num­ber of coun­ties are respon­si­ble for a dis­pro­por­tion­ate num­ber of exe­cu­tions. (Click on the map at left to enlarge.) The infor­ma­tion con­trasts with the coun­ties that have had…

Dr. Allen Ault (pic­tured), a retired Georgia prison war­den, recent­ly appeared on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, dis­cussing the effects of car­ry­ing out exe­cu­tions on prison work­ers. Dr. Ault was one of six retired prison war­dens who had urged Georgia cor­rec­tions offi­cials and Governor Nathan Deal to do what they could to halt the exe­cu­tion of Troy Davis. Davis was exe­cut­ed on September 21, 2011. Dr. Ault dis­cussed the dif­fi­cult ques­tions prison officials…

In a recent op-ed in the New York Daily News, for­mer New York Governor Mario Cuomo called the death penal­ty a ​“seri­ous moral prob­lem” that is ​“cor­ro­sive” to a demo­c­ra­t­ic cit­i­zen­ry. He said many of the prob­lems of the death penal­ty – inef­fec­tive­ness as a deter­rent, unfair­ness, and the risk of exe­cut­ing the inno­cent – are inevitable: ​“These imper­fec­tions — as well as the hor­ri­ble and irre­versible injus­tice they can pro­duce — are inevitable. In this…

The recent Field Poll con­duct­ed in California indi­cat­ed that more vot­ers now pre­fer life with­out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole instead of the death penal­ty for con­vict­ed mur­der­ers. For the first time since the poll began ask­ing the ques­tion over a decade ago, more vot­ers (48%) say they would pre­fer that some­one con­vict­ed of first-degree mur­der be sen­tenced to life with­out parole than the death penal­ty (40%). Eleven years ago, only 37% of respon­dents favored the life sen­tence and…

In one of the first cas­es of the new term, the U.S. Supreme Court on October 4 will hear from attor­neys for death-row inmate Cory Maples of Alabama, whose appeal was reject­ed by low­er courts because his lawyers quit and missed a crit­i­cal fil­ing dead­line in his state appeal. Copies of an Alabama court rul­ing in his case were sent to a vol­un­teer New York law firm han­dling his appeals but were returned unopened to the court because the attorneys…

A recent arti­cle by Alec Baldwin (pic­tured) in the Huffington Post offered the actor’s reflec­tions on the exe­cu­tion of Troy Davis in Georgia. Baldwin said that his posi­tion on the death penal­ty ​“has lit­tle to do with oppo­si­tion to any ​‘eye for an eye’ sen­ti­ments,” but instead, ​“It has to do specif­i­cal­ly with the mis­ap­pli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty in terms of race, in terms of the poten­cy of court-appoint­ed coun­sel and in terms of the admis­sion of DNA evi­dence in…