Publications & Testimony

“By con­tin­u­ing to shroud its exe­cu­tions in secre­cy, Florida under­mines both the integri­ty of its own exe­cu­tion process and, poten­tial­ly, this Court’s abil­i­ty to ensure the State’s com­pli­ance with its con­sti­tu­tion­al oblig­a­tions.” —Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a February 24, 2026 state­ment accom­pa­ny­ing the denial of cer­tio­rari in the case of Melvin Trotter. Melvin Trotter, Ronnie Heath, and Frank Walls — the most recent of the twenty-one…

In the February 2026 episode of DPI’s pod­cast, 12:01: The Death Penalty in Context, Furonda Brasfield (pic­tured, left) and Taylor Bonner (pic­tured, below) speak with DPI Managing Director Anne Holsinger about the racial his­to­ry of the death penal­ty and how cur­rent data and nar­ra­tives about racial jus­tice play a role in advo­ca­cy on the death penal­ty. As the Death Penalty Information Center’s Racial Justice Storyteller, Ms. Bonner blends data and his­to­ry to tell the story of…

The Constitution man­dates that juries be drawn from a​“fair cross-sec­­tion” of the com­mu­ni­ty. Yet pub­lic opin­ion polls show that a sub­stan­tial por­tion of the com­mu­ni­ty oppos­es the death penal­ty. How, then, can the gov­ern­ment seat a jury that will fair­ly decide whether to impose the death penal­ty and pro­tect a defendant’s con­sti­tu­tion­al jury rights? The legal system’s long­stand­ing answer to this ques­tion is a pro­ce­dure called​“death qual­i­fi­ca­tion,” which…

“I am extreme­ly con­cerned by the recent pace of death war­rants and the speed with which the par­ties and involved enti­ties must car­ry out their respec­tive duties.” Florida Supreme Court Justice Jorge Labarga wrote those words in 2023, a year in which Florida con­duct­ed six exe­cu­tions with an aver­age war­rant peri­od of 36 days. Such a pace was already strain­ing the state’s judi­cial, legal, and prison sys­tems. But in 2025, under the sole author­i­ty of Governor Ron DeSantis, the…

February 21, 2006, a California court’s deci­sion effec­tive­ly halt­ed the planned exe­cu­tion of Michael Angelo Morales, mark­ing the start of California’s 20-year mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tion sched­ul­ing and throw­ing into the spot­light the ten­sion between physi­cian par­tic­i­pa­tion in exe­cu­tions and their pledge to show​“the utmost respect for life.” > The events sur­round­ing Morales’s impend­ing fate brought to the sur­face the long-run­n­ing schism between law and medicine,…

DPI’s​“What to Know” series exam­ines cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment from mul­ti­ple angles, one top­ic at a time. Each install­ment pro­vides essen­tial facts and data on spe­cif­ic aspects of the death penal­ty. Please vis­it DPI’s new­ly revamped Race land­ing page for a deep­er dive into the issue. Why it mat­ters: Black peo­ple in the cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tem are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly rep­re­sent­ed – cur­rent­ly com­pris­ing 40% of the death row population despite…