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 argues that the death…

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 the most murders…

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 face when participating in an execution. He…

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 country, a defendant is convicted on proof beyond a…

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 44% preferred the…

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 representing Maples had left the firm. Maples did…

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 cases where tragically slipshod…