Publications & Testimony

The four executions scheduled for the week of November 17^th highlight current trends in executions and death sentencing and the continued use of the death penalty against vulnerable populations. The prisoners scheduled to be executed by four states have raised a number of issues, including prosecutorial misconduct, ineffective assistance of counsel, discrimination against Black jurors, judicial override of jury decisionmaking, serious mental illness, and brain damage. Stephen Barbee (Texas…

The United States Supreme Court has requested the production of the appellate record of a death penalty case in which the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) refused to grant a new trial to a death-row prisoner despite the agreement of county prosecutors that the use of faulty forensic evidence from a discredited crime lab to convict Areli Escobar (pictured) denied him a fair trial. Travis County prosecutors have taken the rare step of filing a response brief in support of Escobar’s…

The Death Penalty Information Center, supported by the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany, launched a new project on Human Rights and the U.S. Death Penalty on November 4, 2022, with a live-streamed panel discussion at the German embassy in Washington, D.C. The recorded event, which featured noted experts and was attended by scholars, advocates, and members of the world diplomatic corps, was the first in a series of webinars that will spotlight human rights issues in the use and…

Texas executed Tracy Beatty (pictured) on November 9, 2022, after the United States Supreme Court declined to review his challenge to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s refusal to unhandcuff the mentally ill and brain damaged death-row prisoner so that defense mental health experts could conduct mental health testing his lawyers argued was necessary in seeking clemency and in attempting to demonstrate his mental incompetency. The Court, without comment or any noted dissent, denied…

A DPIC analysis of 2020 U.S. homicide data has found that murder rates during the pandemic were highest in states with the death penalty and lowest in long-time abolitionist states. DPIC reviewed the 2020 murder data compiled by the center-left think tank The Third Way for its March 2022 report, The Red State Murder Problem. Then, taking the analysis out of the realm of politics and into the context of public policy, DPIC compared the data to states’ death-penalty status and historic usage of…

Virginia made history in 2021 when it became the first Southern state to abolish the death penalty. Closing the Slaughterhouse: The Inside Story of Death Penalty Abolition in Virginia tells the story of the commonwealth’s journey from leading executioner to groundbreaking abolitionist state. Written by journalist, author, and anti-death penalty advocate Dale Brumfield, the book explores Virginia’s history surrounding capital punishment, starting with the first execution in 1608 through its…

Oklahoma has once again put off the execution of Richard Glossip, the seventh time his pending execution has been stayed or reprieved. On November 2, 2022, Governor Kevin Stitt issued a new reprieve, staying Glossip’s scheduled December 8, 2022 execution date “to allow time for the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to address pending legal proceedings” seeking to overturn Glossip’s conviction on grounds of innocence. Stitt’s reprieve extended the stay issued as part of a prior August 2022…

A federal district court in Texas has heard evidence on, and now must decide, whether a severely mentally ill man is competent to be executed. On October 24, 2022, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas began presiding over the competency hearing of Scott Panetti (pictured), whose case established the constitutional standard for competency to be executed, to determine whether he has a rational understanding of his death sentence and the reason for it or is so mentally ill…

In 1994, the United States Supreme Court held in Simmons v. South Carolina that when the prosecution makes future dangerousness an issue in a capital case, a defendant has a due process right to inform jurors that he will not be parole eligible if he is not sentenced to death. For more than a decade, Arizona courts refused to apply that precedent. Then, in 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court summarily struck down that practice in Lynch v. Arizona, holding that the state had failed to implement clearly…

In the October 2022 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Death Penalty Information Center Deputy Director Ngozi Ndulue and Data Storyteller Tiana Herring discuss DPIC’s 2022 report Deeply Rooted: How Racial History Informs Oklahoma’s Death Penalty. The report looks at the racial history, present, and future of Oklahoma’s death penalty. Ndulue and Herring explore Oklahoma’s unique history, the key findings of the report, its relationship to DPIC’s earlier work, and lessons from Oklahoma’s…