Publications & Testimony

The death penal­ty is reserved for “’the worst of the worst’ — or at least that is what we are told,” writes University of Richmond law pro­fes­sor Corrina Barrett Lain (pic­tured) in a Washington & Lee Law Review post-mortem on Virginia​’s use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Although the ​“worst of the worst” is a core com­mand of a con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly com­pli­ant death penal­ty, ​“the death penal­ty doesn’t just exist in the abstract,” Lain notes. And…

As the exe­cu­tion date nears for a Missouri man wide­ly regard­ed to be intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled, a for­mer Missouri Governor, Supreme Court Justice, and papal envoy have joined faith and civ­il rights lead­ers, and the prisoner’s lawyers in efforts to spare his…

Sherwood Brown has been exon­er­at­ed of the charges that sent him to death row in Mississippi in 1995 for a triple mur­der he did not com­mit. On August 24, 2021, DeSoto County Circuit Court Judge Jimmy McClure grant­ed a pros­e­cu­tion motion to dis­miss charges against Brown (pic­tured after his release), who was released lat­er that day after hav­ing spent 26 years on the state’s death row or fac­ing the prospects of a capital…

In the September 2021 episode of Discussions With DPIC, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Frank Baumgartner (pic­tured), one of the nation’s lead­ing aca­d­e­m­ic author­i­ties on the death penal­ty, joins Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham to dis­cuss what research has shown about the impact of race, gen­der, and geog­ra­phy in cap­i­tal cas­es and the cur­rent his­tor­i­cal­ly low lev­el of pub­lic support for…

Two men exon­er­at­ed from death row, one in Ohio and one in Oklahoma, have received mil­lion ‑dol­lar pay­outs for their wrong­ful con­vic­tions and death sen­tences. Both were tried and con­vict­ed in coun­ties with long his­to­ries of pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct and high rates of wrong­ful cap­i­tal con­vic­tions. The com­pen­sa­tion comes more than a decade after each was released from…

In a case that reflects the wan­ing use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, even in the some of the coun­ties that have car­ried out the most exe­cu­tions in mod­ern times, Rick Rhoades on September 28, 2021 became the first per­son con­vict­ed in Harris County (Houston), Texas to be exe­cut­ed in two…

Nine dif­fer­ent groups of advo­cates, includ­ing for­mer pros­e­cu­tors and judges, lead­ing legal schol­ars, inno­cence advo­cates, and defense attor­neys, have filed friend-of-the-court ami­cus briefs in the United States Supreme Court ask­ing the court to rule in favor of Arizona death-row pris­on­ers Barry Jones and David Ramirez in cas­es that could have broad impli­ca­tions for the avail­abil­i­ty of fed­er­al judi­cial review of state…

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) has vacat­ed the con­vic­tion of death-row pris­on­er Clinton Young, whose pros­e­cu­tor was also on the pay­roll of the judge who presided over the tri­al and decid­ed his trial court…

The Nevada Supreme Court has found that a pris­on­er who has been on the state’s death row for more than forty years is ​“actu­al­ly inno­cent” of the death penal­ty and must be…

After more than six years with no exe­cu­tions and with a tri­al pend­ing on the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the state’s lethal injec­tion process, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals has issued death war­rants set­ting sev­en exe­cu­tion dates in a less than five-month peri­od between late October 2021 and mid-March…