Publications & Testimony

The Death Penalty Information Center’s new report on race and the death penalty in Georgia places the state’s death penalty system in historical context, documenting how racial and state sanctioned violence continue to influence today’s administration of the death penalty. Examining Georgia’s History of Racial Violence and Capital Punishment released August 2026, notes the state’s well-documented use of state-sanctioned violence that has disproportionately affected Black communities for nearly…

Florida executed William Silvia on August 18, 2026, the state’s 13^th execution of the year and the 23^rd nationally. Florida has now carried out 57 percent of this year’s executions in the United States and 32 of the 70 carried out nationwide since January 2025. The total builds on 2025, when Florida executed 19 people, the most in any year since the state reinstated capital punishment in 1976 and more than double its previous modern record of eight. Removing Florida from the national execution…

On August 11, 2026, former North Carolina death-sentenced prisoner Frank Chambers, a Black man, was resentenced to two consecutive life sentences in connection with the 1992 shooting deaths of an elderly white couple in Rowan County. Evidence of significant misconduct emerged in Mr. Chambers’ case, and prosecutors ultimately conceded that this evidence tainted the fairness of Mr. Chambers’ death sentence and led to his resentencing. According to his counsel, Mr. Chambers’ trial was also…

UPDATE: Nathalie Greenfield, an attorney for Ms. Andrew, told KGOU that her team would be filing an appeal to the United States Supreme Court within the next 90 days. On August 14, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit declined to reconsider Brenda Andrew’s case and the totality of the evidence in determining whether her trial was fundamentally unfair — leaving in place a panel ruling that found gender-biased evidence at her trial did not…

In her February 2026 article published by the Georgia State University Law Review, University of the District of Columbia Law Professor Ngozi Ndulue argues that recent trends have shifted the federal death penalty “from being a laggard to being a leader in national death penalty trends.” Written before the most recent changes to federal death penalty policy by the Trump administration were implemented, her article highlights how federal death penalty cases, though numerically few, mirror…

On August 11, 2026, the Parliament of Lebanon passed legislation formally abolishing the death penalty. The country’s abolition marks the first country in the Middle East to abolish the practice and the second country among the League of Arab States to do so (Djibouti abolished in 1995). A majority of the members in Lebanon’s 128-seat Parliament voted in favor of this legislation, with Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc voting against it. The legislation will now be sent to Lebanese President…

In the August 2026 episode of 12:01: The Death Penalty in Context, DPI Racial Justice Storyteller Taylor Bonner speaks with Rafiah Muhammad-McCormick (pictured left), Director of Community Outreach for Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (TADP) and founder of Rodney’s Village, a violence prevention non-profit. A murder victim’s family member and community advocate, Ms. Muhammad-McCormick discusses how the loss of her son shaped her approach to violence prevention and death penalty…