Publications & Testimony

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace lau­re­ate who described him­self as ​“pas­sion­ate­ly opposed to the death penal­ty,” died in Cape Town, South Africa on December 26, 2021. He was 90 years…

When Utah County Attorney David Leavitt (pic­tured) announced on September 8, 2021 that his office would no longer pur­sue the death penal­ty, his deci­sion to do so was emblem­at­ic of a broad­er shift in con­ser­v­a­tive think­ing on the death penal­ty. The Republican dis­trict attor­ney from ​“a deeply con­ser­v­a­tive” coun­ty that gave Donald Trump a 41-per­cent­age-point mar­gin of vic­to­ry in the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion joined what the Wall Street Journal describes as ​“a growing…

Fewer peo­ple were on death rows across the United States as of July 1, 2021 or faced con­tin­u­ing jeop­ardy of exe­cu­tion in pend­ing cap­i­tal retri­al or resen­tenc­ing pro­ceed­ings than at any oth­er time in more than three decades, accord­ing to data com­piled by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) and ana­lyzed by the Death Penalty Information…

Devonia Inman, sen­tenced to life in a cap­i­tal mur­der tri­al in which Georgia pros­e­cu­tors hid excul­pa­to­ry evi­dence, has been exon­er­at­ed 23 years after his wrongful…

James Coddington, the last of the sev­en death-row pris­on­ers sched­uled to be put to death in Oklahoma​’s five-month exe­cu­tion spree, has received a stay of…

More than half of all U.S. death-row pris­on­ers are or have recent­ly been incar­cer­at­ed in pro­longed con­di­tions of soli­tary con­fine­ment that are like­ly uncon­sti­tu­tion­al and that vio­late inter­na­tion­al human rights norms, a DPIC analy­sis of data in a recent law review arti­cle has…

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform has sent a let­ter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland seek­ing infor­ma­tion on the Department of Justice’s death penal­ty prac­tices and poli­cies, includ­ing whether DOJ plans to resume fed­er­al exe­cu­tions and to obtain new sup­plies of the drug pen­to­bar­bi­tal to car­ry out additional…

Prosecutors hid favor­able evi­dence from Texas death-row pris­on­er Rodney Reed dur­ing his 1998 tri­al for the mur­der of Stacey Stites and then argued for his exe­cu­tion claim­ing that the evi­dence did not exist, Reed’s lawyers allege in a new court plead­ing filed in his…

At least one in sev­en death-row pris­on­ers put to death in the United States since exe­cu­tions resumed in 1977 had legal claims in their cas­es that would ren­der their exe­cu­tions uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, a new Cornell University Law School study…

Virginia’s his­toric abo­li­tion of the death penal­ty high­light­ed a year in which sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment con­tin­ued to erode, accord­ing to the 2021 Year End Report from the Death Penalty Information Center. Executions, death sen­tences, and pub­lic sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment were all at or near his­toric lows in 2021, the report said, while the exe­cu­tions and new death sen­tences that did take place exposed deep flaws in the admin­is­tra­tion of the nation’s cap­i­tal punishment…