Publications & Testimony

In 2009, the Death Penalty Information Center released a report enti­tled ​“Smart on Crime: Reconsidering the Death Penalty in a Time of Economic Crisis.” The report com­bines an analy­sis of the costs of the death penal­ty with a nation­al poll of police chiefs who put cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment at the bot­tom of their law enforcement…

Researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas recent­ly pub­lished a study on whether exe­cu­tions deter homi­cides using state pan­el date and employ­ing well-known econo­met­ric pro­ce­dures for pan­el analy­sis. The authors found ​“no empir­i­cal sup­port for the argu­ment that the exis­tence or appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty deters prospec­tive offend­ers from com­mit­ting homi­cide.” The study was pub­lished in the jour­nal of Criminology and Public Policy and authored by Tomislav…

In the course of its research, DPIC col­lects rel­e­vant death penal­ty arti­cles that have appeared in print and on media Web sites. Our col­lec­tion cer­tain­ly does not con­tain all such arti­cles, nor do we claim that it rep­re­sents the ​“best” arti­cles. It is only a rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­ple of the exten­sive cov­er­age giv­en to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in print in a par­tic­u­lar year. For those inter­est­ed in exam­in­ing this cov­er­age, we have pre­pared index­es of the arti­cles in PDF for­mat for 2004 to 2007, and an…

Los Angeles Chief of Police William Bratton recent­ly defend­ed San Francisco Distrist Attorney Kamala Harris for not seek­ing the death penal­ty against a sus­pect in a police killing. ​“It’s much cheap­er to sen­tence them to life in prison and throw away the key,” said Bratton, who is endors­ing Harris in seek­ing elec­tion as California’s Attorney…

A recent study pub­lished by a Duke University econ­o­mist revealed North Carolina could save $11 mil­lion annu­al­ly if it dropped the death penal­ty. Philip J. Cook, a pro­fes­sor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, cal­cu­lat­ed the extra state costs of the death penal­ty dur­ing fis­cal years 2005 and 2006. He cal­cu­lat­ed over $21 mil­lion worth of expens­es that would have been saved if the death penal­ty had been repealed. The total…

County esti­mates in Texas indi­cate that the death penal­ty sys­tem is much more expen­sive than sen­tenc­ing inmates to life impris­on­ment. Gray County spent near­ly $1 mil­lion seek­ing the death penal­ty against Levi King, even though he plead­ed guilty to mur­der. Moreover, these costs do not include the cost of appeals, which will fur­ther increase the cost of the cap­i­tal case, nor the costs of cas­es in which the death penal­ty is sought but not giv­en. By com­par­i­son, a non-death…