Publications & Testimony

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…

NEWS (6/​17/​21) — Ohio: A split pan­el of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has grant­ed a new tri­al to Ohio death-row pris­on­er August Cassano, hold­ing that he had been tried in vio­la­tion of his Sixth Amendment right to…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

A new doc­u­men­tary about the case of Carlos DeLuna, a like­ly inno­cent man who was exe­cut­ed in Texas in 1989, pre­mieres June 14, 2021 at the Tribeca Film…

NEWS (6/​9/​21) — Nebraska: A pan­el of three judges has sen­tenced Aubrey Trail to death for the 2017 killing of Sydney Loofe. In a state­ment to the court before the pan­el pro­nounced sen­tence, Trail admit­ted to the killing but said that his co-defen­­dant, Bailey Boswell, who faces cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing hear­ing lat­er this month, was not involved in the killing. Trail is the 12^th per­son on Nebraska’s…

The Georgia Supreme Court has denied a con­sti­tu­tion­al chal­lenge to the state’s statu­to­ry require­ment that a cap­i­tal defen­dant must prove beyond a rea­son­able doubt that he or she is intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled before being declared inel­i­gi­ble for the…

Raymond Riles (pic­tured), the nation’s longest serv­ing death-row pris­on­er, has been…