Arbitrariness
,History of the Death Penalty
,Religion
,Oct 17, 2018
“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 pa…
Botched Executions
,Lethal Injection
,Nov 23, 2022
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 caus…
Arbitrariness
,Costs
,Sentencing Data
,Jan 30, 2013
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 Pennsylvan…
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 featuri…
Innocence
,Prosecutorial Accountability
,Jun 30, 2022
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…
Costs
,Race
,Sentencing Data
,Nov 16, 2018
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 deat…
Innocence
,Prosecutorial Accountability
,Oct 23, 2020
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…
Jul 19, 2021
DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham appeared on the July 16, 2021 episode of New Generation, a podcast…
Deterrence
,Murder Rates
,Sep 12, 2017
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 office…
Sentencing Data
,Executions Overview
,Dec 05, 2017
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 o…
Arbitrariness
,Intellectual Disability
,Mental Illness
,Race
,Religion
,Federal Death Penalty
,Jul 10, 2020
As the scheduled July 13, 2020 date for the first federal executions in 17 years approaches, faith leaders, …
Arbitrariness
,Costs
,Representation
,Aug 31, 2010
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 reinsta…
Innocence
,May 29, 2019
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 …
Jan 31, 2023
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
Jun 11, 2015
Testimony of Robert Brett Dunham, Executive Director, Death Penalty Information Center before the Pennsylvania House Judiciary Committee in connection with Pen…
History of the Death Penalty
,Recent Legislative Activity
,Mar 24, 2021
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.…
Costs
,Innocence
,Victims' Families
,Recent Legislative Activity
,Mar 05, 2021
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 vic…
