Publications & Testimony

The num­ber of pris­on­ers on death row across the United States con­tin­ues to decline while the aver­age amount of time they have been on death row approach­es 19 years, accord­ing to a new report from the Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics…

An Ohio tri­al court has resen­tenced death-row pris­on­er David Braden (pic­tured) to life with­out parole, mak­ing him the first per­son in the nation tak­en off death row by a state law bar­ring cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment for peo­ple with severe mental…

Following addi­tion­al rev­e­la­tions that Richard Glossip (pic­tured) may be inno­cent of the mur­der that sent him to Oklahoma​’s death row in 1998, a bipar­ti­san group of 34 state leg­is­la­tors are call­ing upon Governor Kevin Stitt and the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board to con­duct an inde­pen­dent inves­ti­ga­tion into Glossip’s…

Unheard voic­es from death row come to life in the new book, Right Here, Right Now: Life Stories from America’s Death Row. The book, a col­lab­o­ra­tive project between the arts col­lec­tive Hidden Voices and more than 100 men on death rows across the United States, the­mat­i­cal­ly weaves togeth­er their per­son­al nar­ra­tives to cre­ate a com­pre­hen­sive pic­ture of who is on death row, how they got there, what they expe­ri­ence, and why their lives…

The Nevada Department of Corrections (NVDOC) intends to exe­cute death-row pris­on­er Zane Floyd with a three- or four-drug com­bi­na­tion that has nev­er been used before to put a pris­on­er to death. In a pro­posed exe­cu­tion pro­to­col released on June 10, 2021, NVDOC said its exe­cu­tion cock­tail would be drawn from six pos­si­ble drugs, depending upon…

Today, the DPIC office is closed in obser­vance of Juneteenth, which cel­e­brates the eman­ci­pa­tion of enslaved peo­ple in the United States. As we com­mem­o­rate this hol­i­day, we remem­ber the his­tor­i­cal rela­tion­ship between slav­ery, lynch­ing, Jim Crow seg­re­ga­tion, and the death penal­ty and their use as instru­ments of social con­trol to main­tain racial hier­ar­chy. Our September 2020 report, Enduring Injustice, delves into the his­tor­i­cal use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, pro­vid­ing con­text for the…

The South Carolina Supreme Court has vacat­ed death war­rants for two death-row pris­on­ers sched­uled to be exe­cut­ed this month, stay­ing their exe­cu­tions until the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDOC) com­plies with a new­ly enact­ed state law requir­ing that it offer con­demned pris­on­ers the option of being exe­cut­ed by firing…

As the Department of Justice filed a brief in the U.S. Supreme Court seek­ing rein­state­ment of the death sen­tence imposed on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in the Boston Marathon bomb­ing, the White House press office issued a state­ment stress­ing the inde­pen­dence of the Department over the cas­es it is pur­su­ing and assert­ing that President Joe Biden has not backed away from his cam­paign promise to work to end the federal death…

As South Carolina and Arizona pre­pare to resume exe­cu­tions using grue­some meth­ods of the past, Alabama pros­e­cu­tors say the state is near­ly ready to per­form exe­cu­tions using a new, untest­ed method, nitrogen…