Studies

A Death Penalty Information Center analy­sis of data from the National Registry of Exonerations has found that law enforce­ment use or threat of cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tion against sus­pects or wit­ness­es con­tributed to the wrong­ful con­vic­tions of 10% of the peo­ple exon­er­at­ed in the United States and more than one-fifth of all mur­der exon­er­a­tions in 2020.

Racial bias in jury selec­tion is com­pro­mis­ing the ​“cred­i­bil­i­ty, reli­a­bil­i­ty, and integri­ty of the legal sys­tem,” and its effects are espe­cial­ly pro­nounced in death penal­ty cas­es, a new report from the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has found.

The Georgia Supreme Court is con­sid­er­ing a chal­lenge to the unique­ly high bur­den of proof the state impos­es on cap­i­tal defen­dants and death-row pris­on­ers to deter­mine whether they are inel­i­gi­ble for the death penal­ty because of intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty. On March 23, 2021, the court heard argu­ment in a case brought by Rodney Young, a death-row pris­on­er who asserts that Georgia’s harsh stan­dard uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly sub­jects defen­dants with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty to cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tion and pos­si­ble execution.

A new report by the National Registry of Exonerations has found that police or pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct is ram­pant in death-row exon­er­a­tion cas­es and occurs even more fre­quent­ly when the wrong­ful­ly death-sen­tenced exoneree is Black.

North Carolina​’s death penal­ty is a weapon of social con­trol root­ed in a racist past. That is the mes­sage of a ground­break­ing new col­lab­o­ra­tive project, Racist Roots: Origins of North Carolina’s Death Penalty, by the Durham-based defense orga­ni­za­tion Center for Death Penalty Litigation (CDPL).

The Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) have issued new reports doc­u­ment­ing the con­tin­u­ing his­toric decline of the death penal­ty across the United States.

A study of 40 years of Texas death sen­tences has found that the like­li­hood that a defen­dant accused of a death-eli­gi­ble mur­der will be sen­tenced to death is three times greater if the case involves a white female victim.

In the clos­ing days of its 2020 leg­isla­tive ses­sion, the California leg­is­la­ture passed a trio of racial jus­tice reform bills expect­ed to reduce the influ­ence of racial, eth­nic, and socioe­co­nom­ic bias in the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty in the state with the country’s largest death row.

A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has doc­u­ment­ed a strong link between indi­vid­u­als who hold dehu­man­iz­ing belief sys­tems and sup­port for cap­i­tal punishment.

Executions across the globe fell 5% world­wide in 2019 to the fewest in more than a decade, despite a record num­ber of exe­cu­tions in Saudi Arabia, Amnesty International report­ed in the human rights organization’s Global Report: Death Sentences and Executions in 2019.