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Entries tagged with “Robert Dunham”

Jan 31, 2023

Robert Dunham to Leave Death Penalty Information Center After 8 Years as Executive Director, Board Names Richard Dieter as Interim Director

Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham will be leaving DPIC after eight years at its helm. He will be replaced on interim basis by former Executive Director Richard Dieter. “We wish to express our deep gratitude to Mr. Dunham for his vision and leadership over the past eight years and our best wishes in his future endeavors,” DPIC Board President George Kendall said in a statement released January 30, 2023. “We are also gratified that Mr. Dieter is willing to step in…

Executions

Botched Executions

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Nov 23, 2022

Alabama Governor Halts Executions After Latest in Series of Execution Failures

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey (pictured) has halted executions and ordered a “top-to-bottom review” of the state’s execution procedures, five days after failures by corrections personnel to establish an intravenous execution line caused Alabama to call off the November 17, 2022 execution of Kenneth Smith. The botched execution of Smith marked the third time since 2018 and the second time in two months that Alabama had called off an execution in process. In addition, on July 28, 2022, executioners…

Issues

Jun 30, 2022

DPIC Analysis Finds Prosecutorial Misconduct Implicated in More than 550 Death Penalty Reversals or Exonerations

An analysis by the Death Penalty Information Center has discovered rampant prosecutorial misconduct in death penalty prosecutions. DPIC’s ongoing review of death sentences imposed and overturned after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down existing death penalty statutes in 1972 has identified more than 550 prosecutorial misconduct reversals and exonerations in capital cases (click to enlarge image). That amounts to more than 5.6% of all death sentences imposed in the United States in the past…

Jul 19, 2021

DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham Appears on Sharon (Pennsylvania) Herald “New Generation” Podcast

DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham appeared on the July 16, 2021 episode of New Generation, a podcast produced by the Sharon (Pennsylvania) Herald, in connection with the newspaper’s Crime of Punishment editorial series. Dunham spoke with hosts Tanner Mondok and Janeé Avery in a broad-ranging discussion about systemic problems in the administration of the U.S. death penalty. Herald editor Jeff Gerritt, winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, previewed the paper’s editorial…

Research

Mar 24, 2021

Virginia Becomes 23rd State and the First in the South to Abolish the Death Penalty

Saying “[t]here is no place today for the death penalty in this commonwealth, in the South, or in this nation,” Governor Ralph Northam (pictured) signed historic legislation making Virginia the 23rd U.S. state and the first in the South to abolish capital punishment. Governor Northam signed the bill in a March 24, 2021 ceremony at the Greensville Correctional Center, where the commonwealth’s execution chamber had been located since 1991. With Virginia’s abolition, a majority of U.S. states…

Issues

Victims' Families

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Mar 05, 2021

Wyoming Senate Committee Passes Bill to Repeal State’s Death Penalty

A Wyoming state senate committee has advanced to the full Senate a bill to repeal the state’s death penalty. After taking testimony from witnesses including the state public defender’s office, family members of murder victims, a death-row exoneree, anti-death-penalty activists, religious organizations, and a national expert on capital punishment, the all-Republican Senate Revenue Committee voted 4 – 1 on March 4, 2021 to pass Senate File 150. The vote marked the second time in three years that a…

Issues

Oct 23, 2020

DPIC Analysis: Use or Threat of Death Penalty Implicated in 19 Exoneration Cases in 2019

Prosecutors or police used or threatened to use the death penalty as a coercive tool that led to or extended the wrongful convictions of at least nineteen people who were exonerated in 2019, a Death Penalty Information Center analysis of data from the National Registry of Exonerations has revealed. Nearly 95% of those cases also involved some other form of major misconduct, the DPIC analysis found. DPIC’s special report, Use or Threat of Death Penalty Implicated in 19 Exoneration Cases in…

Issues

Religion

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Federal Death Penalty

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Jul 10, 2020

Op-Eds Highlight Disparities in Federal Death Penalty, as 1,000 Faith Leaders and the European Union Urge Justice Department to Halt Executions

As the scheduled July 13, 2020 date for the first federal executions in 17 years approaches, faith leaders, diplomats, and legal experts have asked the federal government to call them off. 1,000 faith leaders from across the country have urged President Trump and Attorney General Barr to halt the executions. They are joined by the European Union, which on July 10 also issued a statement strongly opposing the resumption of federal executions. Complementing their efforts, two recent op-eds by…

Issues

May 29, 2019

Philadelphia Death-Row Exoneree Harold Wilson Dies at 61

Harold Wilson, exonerated in 2005 sixteen years after his wrongful conviction and death sentence for a triple murder in a Philadelphia crack house, has died. He had recently suffered a series of strokes that were further complicated by pneumonia. His risk of stroke and the complications that followed had been worsened by the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder he developed as a result of the 17 years he faced the death penalty, most spent in solitary confinement on death row. He died on May 18, 2019.

Issues

Nov 16, 2018

DPIC Analysis: The Decline of the Death Penalty in Philadelphia

During his election campaign, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner described the economic wastefulness of city prosecutors’ pursuit of the death penalty as “lighting money on fire.” A DPIC analysis of the outcomes of the more than 200 death sentences imposed in the city since 1978 (click here to enlarge image) and the last seven years of capital prosecution outcomes provides strong support for Krasner’s claim. Data tracking the final dispositions of cases in which Pennsylvania…

Issues

Religion

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Oct 17, 2018

ABA Panel Explores History, Morality of Death Penalty

“Has the death penalty evolved into an anachronism?” asked a panel at the August 2, 2018 American Bar Association Annual Meeting in Chicago. Moderator Ronald Tabak, chair of the ABA Death Penalty Committee, and panelists Cardinal Blase J. Cupich of the Archdiocese of Chicago; Karen Gottlieb, co-director of the Florida Center for Capital Representation; Meredith Martin Rountree, senior lecturer at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law; and Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty…

Research

Executions Overview

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Dec 05, 2017

No Executions in the “Capital of Capital Punishment” for First Time in 30 Years

Harris County (Houston), Texas, has executed 126 prisoners since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Texas’s capital punishment statute in 1976, more than any other county in the United States and, apart from the rest of Texas, more than any state. But in 2017, no one will be sentenced to death in Harris County and, for the first time since 1985, no one sentenced to death in the county will be executed. In 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court also overturned two controversial Harris County death-penalty…

Issues

Murder Rates

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Sep 12, 2017

NEW PODCAST: DPIC Study Finds No Evidence that Death Penalty Deters Murder or Protects Police

A Death Penalty Information Center analysis of U.S. murder data from 1987 through 2015 has found no evidence that the death penalty deters murder or protects police. Instead, the evidence shows that murder rates, including murders of police officers, are consistently higher in death-penalty states than in states that have abolished the death penalty. And far from experiencing increases in murder rates or open season on law enforcement, the data show that states that have abolished the death…

Jan 27, 2016

Criminal Justice Committee, Florida Senate: Materials from hearing on revisions to Florida’s death penalty statute in light of Hurst v. Florida

Criminal Justice Committee, Florida Senate: Materials from hearing on revisions to Florida’s death penalty statute in light of Hurst v. Florida featuring testimony of Robert Dunham, Executive Director, Death Penalty Information Center (Tallahassee, January 27, 2016). Mr. Dunham’s testimony begins at the 11:30 mark of the video of the Senate Committee Meeting.

Issues

Jan 30, 2013

ARBITRARINESS: Pennsylvania’s Costly and Broken Death Penalty System

The theory of the death penalty is that prosecutors select offenders who have committed aggravated murder and obtain death sentences for the most heinous offenders through a scrupulous trial with full due process. The reality in Pennsylvania is radically different. Hundreds of inmates have been sentenced to death, but of the cases that have completed the appeals process, 100% have been overturned, mostly because of errors in the conviction or sentencing stages. (Three inmates were executed, but…

Issues

Aug 31, 2010

Pennsylvania’s Costly Death Penalty Produces Nothing in Return

Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell has signed 113 execution warrants during his two terms in office, yet it appears likely that he will leave office in a few months without seeing any of them carried out. Since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1978, only three men have been executed, all of whom had waived their appeals. Inadequate funding for criminal defense may be one of the primary reasons for this de facto moratorium. Since 1978, state and federal courts have overturned 124…