Publications & Testimony

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. This install­ment looks at clemen­cy: what it is, who holds the pow­er, and how often it changes the out­come of a cap­i­tal case. Why it mat­ters: The U.S. Supreme Court has described clemen­cy as the​“fail safe” of the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem, the last rem­e­dy for a wrongful…

A spokesper­son for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment will not seek a death sen­tence for Vance Boelter, the man accused of killing Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her hus­band, Mark Hortman. Mr. Boelter is charged with their mur­ders and stalk­ing, but DOJ said that stalk­ing like­ly would not meet the def­i­n­i­tion of a​“crime of vio­lence,” which would be nec­es­sary to secure a fed­er­al death sen­tence. Mr. Boelter also…

On May 28, 2026, an Alabama fed­er­al dis­trict judge ruled that nitro­gen gas exe­cu­tions are con­sti­tu­tion­al and do not vio­late the Eighth Amendment’s pro­tec­tion against cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment. In the first fed­er­al bench tri­al exam­in­ing nitro­gen gas as a method of exe­cu­tion, U.S. District Judge Emily C. Marks found that death-sen­­tenced pris­on­er Jeffery Lee​“failed to prove that [Alabama’s gas] Protocol caus­es more than​‘the nec­es­sary suffering involved…

In a June 1, 2026, op-ed in The New York Times, Maria DeLiberato, senior coun­sel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Capital Punishment Project, offers a first-per­­son account of the May 21 attempt by Tennessee to exe­cute her client, Tony Carruthers — and the hour of suf­fer­ing she wit­nessed before Governor Bill Lee called off his exe­cu­tion. Ms. DeLiberato, who joined Mr. Carruthers’ legal team just two months before his sched­uled exe­cu­tion date, describes entering the…

In recent weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court issued deci­sions regard­ing two key types of claims that often appear in cap­i­tal cas­es: pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct and intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty. A bipar­ti­san group of con­ser­v­a­tive and lib­er­al jus­tices car­ried each deci­sion. The Court ruled in favor of Mississippi pris­on­er Terry Pitchford, allow­ing his jury dis­crim­i­na­tion claim to pro­ceed, as well as Florida pris­on­er Gary Whitton, based on a low­er court error in…

In her chap­ter of the new­ly pub­lished book Neuroscience in Criminal Justice Systems: The Positive Impact of Neurojustice, Fordham Law Professor and Founding Director of the Neuroscience and Law Center Deborah Denno explores the use of neu­ro­sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence in crim­i­nal cas­es involv­ing brain injury, both from exter­nal caus­es (e.g., car acci­dents or gun­shot wounds) and inter­nal caus­es (e.g., demen­tia or alco­hol-induced brain dam­age). The chap­ter titled,​“The…

Tennessee​’s attempt to exe­cute Tony Carruthers on May 21, 2026, failed after exe­cu­tion team mem­bers could not estab­lish an intra­venous line after more than an hour of attempts, prompt­ing Governor Bill Lee to grant a one-year reprieve. In a writ­ten state­ment, the Tennessee Department of Corrections said med­ical per­son­nel had quick­ly estab­lished a pri­ma­ry IV line but were unable to estab­lish a back­up line as required by the state’s exe­cu­tion pro­to­col. Efforts to…

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