Discussions With DPIC: Recent Episodes
Death Penalty Information Center
Examining issues in the death penalty system. Brought to you by the Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit organization serving the media and the public with analysis and information on issues concerning capital punishment.
In this month’s podcast episode of 12:01 The Death Penalty in Context, DPI’s Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with Corinna Barrett Lain, the S.D. Roberts & Sandra Moore Professor of Law at the University of Richmond School of Law and author of the recently published book, Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection. Ms. Lain’s new book challenges a widely held assumption that lethal injection is a painless, regulated, and medically-sound process.
In this month’s podcast episode of 12:01: The Death Penalty in Context, DPI’s Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with Professors Craig Haney and Frank Baumgartner, and DPI’s Staff Attorney Leah Roemer about the legacy of the US Supreme Court’s decision in Roper v. Simmons and the legal and scientific landscape surrounding the use of the death penalty for young adults ages 18-20. Professors Baumgartner and Haney, along with fellow researcher Karen Steele, collaborated on a 2023 study which discusses the legal context and rationale of the Court’s decision in Roper when it barred the death penalty for juveniles under age 18. Ms. Roemer is a major contributor to DPI’s new report, Immature Minds in a “Maturing Society": Roper v. Simmons at 20.
In this month’s podcast episode of 12:01 The Death Penalty in Context, DPI’s Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with Sabrina Butler-Smith (pictured), who was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death at age 17 for causing the death of her nine-month-old son. After two years and nine months on death row, Ms. Butler-Smith’s conviction was overturned. At a second trial, it was determined that her son died from a serious medical condition, polycystic kidney disease, and she was acquitted. Since her exoneration, Ms. Butler-Smith has become an advocate against wrongful convictions and works with Witness to Innocence, an organization of death row exonerees, for death row exonerees.
Here’s the description for today’s podcast: In the February 2025 episode of 12:01: The Death Penalty in Context, DPI Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with three experts on California’s Racial Justice Act (RJA). Natasha Minsker, an attorney and consultant, formerly of the ACLU, speaks on the history of the RJA and the impetus for its passage. Genevie Gold, research and writing fellow at the Office of the State Public Defender (OSPD), describes the process that an RJA claim follows through the legal system, and how the RJA has affected the work of OSPD. Avi Frey, a lawyer at the ACLU of Northern California, explains the potential systemic effects of the RJA, which are just beginning to take shape as the legislation approaches its fifth anniversary of passage.
In this month’s episode of 12:01: The Death Penalty in Context, Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with DPI Communications Associate Hayley Bedard, about The Death Penalty in 2024, which highlights trends and events related to the death penalty. 2024 marked the tenth consecutive year during which fewer than 30 people were executed (25) and fewer than 50 people were sentenced to death (26), while high profile cases of death-sentenced people attracted significant media attention and new, unexpected supporters. Per the report’s findings, just four states (Alabama, Texas, Missouri, and Oklahoma) were responsible for more than three-quarters (76%) of executions in 2024.
In this month’s episode of Discussions with DPI, Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with Beth Shelburne, a journalist who has reported on the criminal legal system for over 25 years and creator of the podcast Earwitness. Released in 2023 to critical acclaim, Earwitness tells the story of Toforest Johnson, a death-sentenced man who is facing execution in Alabama despite strong evidence of his innocence. On November 14, 2024, Mr. Johnson filed a petition with the Jefferson County Circuit Court requesting a new hearing, the latest in a series of appeals.
“I realized that this is such a protracted injustice with so many twists and turns over a quarter of a century. So many people have been exploited in the process that it really is a case that's emblematic of many terrible issues in our criminal justice system, and I felt like in order to capture all of that in its totality, I wanted to slow down and really unpack this case in a meaningful way,” explains Ms. Shelburne on why she decided to create the Earwitness podcast. She shares the challenges she and her team faced, including the “fading memories of people … [who] just couldn't remember the finite details that we felt were so crucial ... to pin down. Luckily, we were able to get our hands on quite a bit of source material through.”
In this month’s episode of Discussions with DPIC, Executive Director Robin Maher speaks with Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown law professor and expert on the Supreme Court. Professor Vladeck is the author of The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic, released in 2023, as well as the weekly newsletter One First, which breaks down the Court’s rulings and history. Professor Vladeck explains why the Court’s treatment of death penalty cases has recently changed, the role the Court played in creating many of the problems with death penalty cases it now complains about, and how the death penalty shaped the Court’s new orientation and approach to other areas of law.
Rereleased for September 2024: In the March 2021 edition of Discussions with DPIC, Death Penalty Information Center Senior Director of Research and Special Projects Ngozi Ndulue is joined by Carine Williams — the Chief Program Strategy Officer at the Innocence Project — for a conversation about innocence, the death penalty, and “the function of freedom.” Reflecting on the gross miscarriage of justice exhibited in wrongful convictions and exonerations, Williams stresses two critical themes: death is irrevocable and ending the death penalty is simply not enough.
In this month’s episode of Discussions with DPIC, Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with Leah Roemer, DPIC’s Legal Fellow and a primary author of our recent report, Lethal Election: How the U.S. Electoral Process Increases the Arbitrariness of the Death Penalty. Leah graduated from Berkeley Law in 2023, where she participated in the Death Penalty Clinic and earned a certificate in Public Interest and Social Justice. Leah discusses how some judges, prosecutors, and politicians alter their behavior in capital cases while running for office, creating unpredictability and inconsistent outcomes for people facing death sentences. However, she explains that the “accepted political wisdom” about the death penalty—that an official must take a pro-death stance to win an election—no longer appears to be true based on DPIC’s research, as many voters now favor candidates willing to criticize or even oppose capital punishment.
In this month’s episode of Discussions with DPIC, Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with Jessica Sutton, principal attorney with Phillips Black, a nonprofit public interest law firm focused capital defense. Ms. Sutton has represented clients facing the death penalty in more than a dozen jurisdictions across the U.S. and at all stages of proceedings. In recognition of Pride month, Ms. Sutton discusses the unique challenges LGBTQ+ people face in the capital punishment system and strategies defense teams can use to acknowledge and address these challenges.
In this month’s episode of Discussions with DPIC, Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with Lamont Hunter, a former Ohio death-sentenced prisoner who was wrongfully convicted of causing the death of his three-year-old son. After nearly 18 years of incarceration, Mr. Hunter was released from Ohio’s death row on June 15, 2023, after pleading guilty to lesser charges in exchange for his freedom. Since his release, Mr. Hunter has spoken widely about his experience with the criminal legal system and the dangers of wrongful convictions.
In this month’s episode of Discussions with DPIC, Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with Elisabeth Semel, Clinical Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Semel joined Berkeley Law in 2001 as the first director of the school’s death penalty clinic and remains the clinic’s co-director, where students have represented individuals facing capital punishment and written amicus briefs in death penalty cases before the United States Supreme Court. In recognition of 38th year anniversary of the landmark US Supreme Court ruling in Batson v. Kentucky (1986), Professor Semel discusses the implications of the Court’s ruling and recent efforts in California to eliminate racial discrimination in capital punishment and jury selection.
In this month’s episode ofDiscussions with DPIC, Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with Judge Elsa Alcala, who served on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals from 2011 to 2018. In addition to serving as a judge at the appeals and trial level, she worked as a prosecutor, criminal defense attorney, and most recently as a justice-reform lobbyist during her three-decade career in criminal law. She shares how these experiences have informed her perspective on the death penalty and identifies recommendations for criminal legal reforms.
In this month’s episode of Discussions with DPIC, Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with Keri Blakinger, a journalist at the Los Angeles Times and former reporter for the Marshall Project—a nonprofit news organization focused on the U.S. criminal justice system. At the Marshall Project, Ms. Blakinger wrote stories about the human beings in the criminal justice system—a focus that is still a priority in her reporting with Los Angeles Times.
Ms. Blakinger’s personal experience with prison has given her a unique perspective. In her book, Corrections in Ink: A Memoir (2022), she powerfully tells the story of her personal journey beginning as a young competitive figure skater with an eating disorder, through addiction and incarceration, and ultimately to her transformation into journalist and advocate.
In this month’s episode of Discussions with DPIC, Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with former death-sentenced prisoner Anthony Graves. Exonerated from Texas’ death row in 2010, Mr. Graves has since become an advocate for criminal justice reform, creating the Anthony Graves Foundation, working with the ACLU and Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, and testifying before the U.S. Senate on prison conditions. Mr. Graves has also authored an autobiography titled Infinite Hope: How Wrongful Conviction, Solitary Confinement and 12 Years on Death Row Failed to Kill My Soul.
In this month's episode of Discussions with DPIC, Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with John Bessler (pictured), of Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law. Professor Bessler is the author of several books on the death penalty, including his 2023 book The Death Penalty's Denial of Fundamental Human Rights: International Law, State Practice, and the Emerging Abolitionist Norm. In his most recent book, Professor Bessler argues that the death penalty should be classified as torture, which would prohibit its use under international law and treaties. The reality of capital punishment, he explains, is that it is "really just a series of credible death threats." The capital charge is a death threat, the death sentence is a more credible death threat, and the execution itself is a very imminent death threat. International law already prohibits mock executions as a "classic form of psychological torture," and Professor Bessler argues that the death penalty, with its repeated threats to execute, should be viewed the same way. "[T]here's really no way to eliminate the psychological torment that is associated with scheduling someone's death and then subjecting them to that continuous threat of death during the entire process."
In this month’s Discussions with DPIC, Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with Sandra Babcock (pictured), Clinical Professor at Cornell Law School, Faculty Director, and founder of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide. Ms. Babcock’s clinic currently represents death sentenced women in the United States, Malawi, and Tanzania and is focused on providing defense teams in retentionist countries with training and consultation in order to provide the best possible legal representation for individuals facing sentences of death. The Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide also produces research highlighting the intersection of gender and the death penalty, as well as international legal issues and capital punishment. Ms. Babcock explains how the Center’s research has uncovered widespread, yet overlooked issues that women and other gender minorities face in the criminal legal system.
In this month’s Discussions with DPIC, Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with Margot Ravenscroft, the Executive Director of AMICUS UK, a British charity that works to support the capital defense effort in the United States. Ms. Ravenscroft describes how AMICUS was founded by a British woman who became a pen friend with a Louisiana death row prisoner and returned to the UK after his execution, determined to provide assistance for those still on death row. Ms. Ravenscroft describes why the organization trains and supports British lawyers and law firms to work with US defense counsel, and how their efforts help ensure that every person on death row has adequate counsel and fair proceedings.
In the September 2023 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Anne Holsinger, Managing Director of DPIC, speaks with Pastor Rich Nathan, founding pastor of Vineyard Columbus, an evangelical Christian church based in Ohio. Mr. Nathan shares his pro-life perspective and explains how religious teachings inform his position on the death penalty.
In the August 2023 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Anne Holsinger, Managing Director of DPIC, speaks with Dr. Roya Boroumand, Executive Director of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran. A specialist in Iran’s post-World War 2 history, Dr. Boroumand provides historical context for ongoing events and discusses the current increase in executions. With the one-year anniversary of Mahsa Jina Amini’s death approaching, Dr. Boroumand alsohighlights the international community’s response to this event and the protests that followed.
In the July 2023 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Anne Holsinger, Managing Director of DPIC, speaks with Kirk Bloodsworth, the first person exonerated from death row by DNA evidence. Mr. Bloodsworth reflects on the thirty years since his exoneration and discusses the experience of being wrongfully convicted. He also describes the work he and other exonerees have done, and how the issue of innocence has affected legislation on the death penalty.
In the June 2023 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Death Penalty Information Center Managing Director Anne Holsinger and Data Storyteller Tiana Herring discuss the latest Racial Justice Storytelling Report, Doomed to Repeat: The Legacy of Race in Tennessee’s Contemporary Death Penalty. The report examines the history of Tennessee’s capital punishment system, documenting the continued impact of racial discrimination and racial violence on the administration of the death penalty. Ms. Herring, the author, provides an overview of the report, explores key findings, explains its relationship to DPIC’s earlier work, and identifies similar and unique trends in Tennessee.
In the latest episode of Discussions with DPIC, Anne Holsinger, Managing Director of DPIC, interviews Dr. Sally Satel (pictured), a psychiatrist and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She shares her insights on the role of severe mental illness in death penalty cases.
In the latest episode of “Discussions with DPIC,” Anne Holsinger, Managing Director of DPIC, interviews Ron McAndrew, a former Florida Prison Warden who witnessed executions using electrocution and lethal injection in Florida and Texas. He offers reflections on the negative impact that executions have on the families of both the victim and the condemned, the correctional officers, and on himself.
In the latest episode of “Discussions with DPIC,” Robert Dunham of DPIC interviews Karen Steele (pictured), a researcher and defense attorney in Oregon, regarding the special characteristics of late adolescent defendants facing the death penalty. Research by Steele and others points to the incomplete brain development in those aged 18-21 and how that can be exacerbated in those suffering from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. The research has also found that late-adolescent defendants of color are disproportionately sentenced to death.
In the February 2023 edition of Discussions with DPIC, former Oregon Superintendent of Prisons Frank Thompson speaks with DPIC Managing Director Anne Holsinger about how his experiences as a corrections officer—as well as being a murder victim’s family member—have affected his views on capital punishment. Thompson oversaw the only two executions performed in Oregon in the past 50 years and was responsible for developing the execution protocol. He said the process of performing executions created “an additional group of victims” among the prison staff. Seeing the stress it caused him and his colleagues eventually led Thompson to oppose the death penalty.
Longtime civil and human rights lawyer, Diann Rust-Tierney, the executive director of Georgetown University’s Racial Justice Institute, joins DPIC executive director Robert Dunham for a discussion of race, human rights, and the U.S. death penalty. Prof. Rust-Tierney argues that the death penalty has long been misperceived as a normal public safety tool. The reality, she says, is that “from its very beginning in history, [the death penalty] was part of a legal and social system designed to keep various races in their place.” Rust-Tierney says that racial disparities in the application of the death penalty are not “unfortunate byproducts” of the punishment’s legacy of slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow segregation. “I've come to understand that the death penalty is actually operating exactly as it was intended,” she says. “It is intended to teach us whose lives are worth valuing and whose lives are not.”
In the October 2022 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Death Penalty Information Center Deputy Director Ngozi Ndulue and Data Storyteller Tiana Herring discuss DPIC’s recently released report Deeply Rooted: How Racial History Informs Oklahoma’s Death Penalty. The report looks at the racial history, present, and future of Oklahoma’s death penalty. Ndulue and Herring explore Oklahoma’s unique history, the key findings of the report, its relationship to DPIC’s earlier work, and lessons from Oklahoma’s experience that are applicable nationwide.
Former Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry and former U.S. Magistrate Judge Andy Lester, who co-chaired the bipartisan Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission, join DPIC executive director Robert Dunham in the August 2022 Discussions With DPIC podcast. Governor Henry, a Democrat, and Judge Lester, a Republican, discuss the findings of the commission’s review that led them to call for a halt to the state’s planned executions of 25 prisoners, at least until significant reforms have been adopted.
“The most critical recommendation that we made,” Governor Henry said, “was that unless and until significant reforms occur in the entire death penalty process, we should not be executing people in Oklahoma. … [I]f we're going to have the death penalty in Oklahoma, my goodness, it ought to be done right.” Lester strongly agrees. “The system, if we don't take up the bulk of these recommendations, is broken,” he says. “And we need to fix the system before moving forward.”
In the July 2022 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham and 2021-2022 DPIC Data Fellow Aimee Breaux discuss the making of DPIC’s groundbreaking Death Penalty Census database and some of its key findings. The project, the culmination of nearly five years of work, tracks the demographics and status of more than 9,700 death sentences imposed across the U.S. since the Supreme Court struck down existing death penalty statutes in 1972. The data, Dunham says, reveal “a system that is rife with error, filled with discrimination, [and] very, very difficult to fairly administer.”
In the May 2022 episode of Discussions With DPIC, Professor Alexis Hoag (pictured) of Brooklyn Law School joined DPIC Deputy Director Ngozi Ndulue for a wide-ranging conversation marking the 35th anniversary of McCleskey v. Kemp, a 1987 U.S. Supreme Court decision that rejected a constitutional challenge to the death penalty that showed strong statistical evidence of racial disparities in capital prosecutions and death sentences. Professor Hoag, formerly an attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (“LDF”), describes the decision as “critically important to our understanding of the death penalty and the inherent anti-Black racism that runs throughout it.”
In the March 2022 episode of Discussions With DPIC, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law Senior Lecturer Meredith Rountree speaks with Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham about her study of the types of evidence that influence juror decision-making at the sentencing stage of capital cases. Rountree and her co-author Dr. Mary Rose of the University of Texas, reviewed and analyzed 176 verdict forms completed by juries in federal death penalty cases, focusing on three legally controversial areas of mitigating evidence that juries found to be important to their decisions on life or death: the impact of a person’s execution on their loved ones, the sentences received by co-participants in the offense, and the role of government negligence. The research wasn’t “just a survey of what jurors think matters,” Rountree explains. It also asked and answers important questions on “how does this fit in to their moral decision making?” Read Meredith Rountree and Mary Rose, The Complexities of Conscience: Reconciling Death Penalty Law with Capital Jurors’ Concerns, 69 Buffalo Law Review 1237 (Dec. 2021).
New Hampshire State Representative Renny Cushing passed away earlier this month. In memory of Cushing's life and legacy, DPIC is reissuing the June 2019 podcast in which Cushing spoke with DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham. Cushing described the life-altering experience of having a close family member murdered and his journey from being a murder-family survivor to spearheading New Hampshire’s repeal of the death penalty.
In the February 2022 episode of Discussions with DPIC, federal public defender, Amanda Bass (pictured, right) and Justice for Julius advocate Cece Jones-Davis (pictured, left) speak with Death Penalty Information Center Managing Director Anne Holsinger about the questionable conviction and near execution of former Oklahoma death-row prisoner, Julius Jones. They discuss how incompetent representation and prosecutorial misconduct sent Jones to death row in Oklahoma County, how advocacy on his innocence and about racial bias in his case led to the commutation of his death sentence four hours before it was to be carried out, and what comes next in the continuing efforts to set Jones free.
In the January 2022 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Contra Costa County, California District Attorney Diana Becton, speaks with Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham about the rise in reform prosecutors across the country, the inherent flaws in capital punishment that leads her to work alongside other reform prosecutors to end the death penalty, and her efforts as district attorney to bring fairness and equity to the criminal legal system. Becton is the first woman and first African American to serve as District Attorney in Contra Costa. Prior to becoming District Attorney in 2017, she served for twenty-two years as a judge in the county, where she was elected as the Contra County court’s Presiding Judge. She discusses with Dunham how her lived experiences shape how she sees her role as a District Attorney, the pushback against reform prosecutors who are women of color by those interested in maintaining the status quo, and the larger national movement to change America’s approach to criminal justice.
In the December 2021 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Death Penalty Information Center Deputy Director Ngozi Ndulue interviews State Representative Jean Schmidt about her work as a primary sponsor of a bill in the Ohio House of Representatives that would abolish capital punishment in the state. A long-time Republican elected official, Rep. Schmidt also served in the U.S. House of Representatives for ten years. She avidly supported the death penalty early in her career but now is an advocate of criminal justice reform. Ndulue and Schmidt discuss the Republican party’s and Schmidt’s own evolving views on capital punishment, its myriad economic and emotional costs, mistakes in the criminal legal system, and public safety. According to Schmidt, “the death penalty is creating more victims than the crime itself.”
In the November 2021 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Daniel Chen, counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, speaks with DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham about the Supreme Court case Ramirez v. Collier and death-row prisoners’ rights to religious freedom. John Ramirez has challenged Texas’ restrictions on audible prayer and physical touch by his spiritual advisor during his execution. Allowing such pastoral comfort in the execution chamber, Chen says, is about “fundamental human dignity.” Chen describes the Becket Fund’s involvement in Ramirez and other cases involving the free exercise of religion in the execution chamber, and traces the history of audible prayer and clergy touch during executions. Texas’ policy is out of step with historical practices, including its own pre-2019 regulations, Chen explains. Chen and Dunham conclude their discussion exploring the Becket Fund’s belief that the fundamental human right to religious liberty must be protected, even “for people who might be different from us, who might have different life circumstances,” including those on death row.
In the September 2021 episode of Discussions With DPIC, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill political scientist Frank Baumgartner (pictured), one of the nation’s leading academic authorities on the death penalty, joins Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham to discuss what research has shown about the impact of race, gender, and geography in capital cases and the current historically low level of public support for capital punishment. Asked what 50 years of data tell us about the possibility of death-penalty policy reform, Baumgartner says, “At this stage, what we really need to do is admit that [capital punishment] is a failed experiment.”
In the third episode of the Discussions with DPIC podcast’s Rethinking Public Safety series, Miriam Krinskyspeaks with DPIC Senior Director of Research and Special Projects Ngozi Ndulue about her experiences as a former federal prosecutor and the Executive Director of Fair and Just Prosecution (FJP), a network of elected prosecutors devoted to promoting fairness, equity, compassion, and fiscal responsibility in the criminal legal system. Krinsky and Ndulue explore a range of issues during the podcast, including the injustice of the death penalty, the power of prosecutors to create change, the evolving relationship between prosecutors and law enforcement, the importance of transparency and public accountability, and myths about public safety. “In my mind,” Krinsky says, “eliminating capital punishment improves public safety.”
The July 2021 episode of Discussions with DPIC features a conversation between DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham and Marc Bookman, the co-founder and Executive Director of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation (ACCR), regarding his critically acclaimed new book, A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays. Bookman and Dunham explore a wide range of systemic death-penalty problems addressed in the book, which was released in May 2021. The topics include mental illness, racial injustice, judicial and juror bias, ineffective representation, and prosecutorial misconduct.
In the second episode of DPIC's Rethinking Public Safety series, DPIC Managing Director Anne Holsinger interviews Dr. Karen Gedney about her 30-year career as a doctor in the Nevada prison system. Dr. Gedney speaks about how prison conditions affect the physical and mental health of prisoners, how prison bureaucracy determines the quality of care that prisoners receive, and how executions take a toll on prison staff. She tells the story of her refusal to write a prescription for execution drugs in 1989, believing that doing so violated her duty to provide medical care to prisoners. Today, Dr. Gedney is an advocate for the abolition of the death penalty, and she explains how her career influenced her views on capital punishment.Content warning: This episode includes a brief mention of sexual assault.
The April 2021 episode of Discussions with DPIC features the first episode of DPIC’s new podcast series, Rethinking Public Safety. These episodes will feature interviews with public safety officials, discussing the evolution of their views on capital punishment and how their experiences in various public safety fields influenced their thinking. The first episode is a conversation between former Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro and DPIC Senior Director of Research and Special Projects Ngozi Ndulue. Petro describes how learning about wrongful convictions and the high cost of the death penalty changed his views on capital punishment. As a state legislator, he supported a bill to reinstate Ohio’s death penalty after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the state’s previous capital punishment statute. Later, as Ohio Attorney General, he supervised 19 executions in the state. Since then, his views have changed and he now supports repealing the state’s death penalty.
In the March 31, 2021 podcast episode of Discussions with DPIC, managing director of DPIC, Anne Holsinger, and Raphael Sperry, president of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR), discuss the American Institute of Architects’ (AIA) new ethics policy prohibiting members from designing execution chambers and death-row solitary confinement cells. “Architects have been complicit in human rights abuse by designing execution chambers in the United States and spaces for solitary confinement,” Sperry explains. “We need to take responsibility and taking responsibility means stopping doing these bad things.”
In the March 2021 edition of Discussions with DPIC, Death Penalty Information Center Senior Director of Research and Special Projects Ngozi Ndulue is joined by Carine Williams — the Chief Program Strategy Officer at the Innocence Project — for a conversation about innocence, the death penalty, and “the function of freedom.” Reflecting on the gross miscarriage of justice exhibited in wrongful convictions and exonerations, Williams stresses two critical themes: death is irrevocable and ending the death penalty is simply not enough.
In the January 2021 episode of Discussions With DPIC, Rudolph McCollum and Liz Ryan join DPIC Managing Director Anne Holsinger for a conversation about their efforts to obtain posthumous pardons for the “Martinsville 7,” seven Black men who were executed in Virginia for the alleged rape of a white woman in 1949. McCollum, a former mayor of Richmond, is the nephew of two of the executed men and Ryan is the president and CEO of the Youth First Initiative. They discuss the miscarriage of justice in the case, what a posthumous pardon could mean for the state and family members of the executed men, and how the case fits in with the history of racial injustice in Virginia and current efforts to repeal the Commonwealth’s death penalty.
In the December 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, anesthesiologist Dr. Joel Zivot from Emory University Hospital speaks with Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham about his discoveries from the autopsies of more than 200 executed prisoners that shattered the myth that death by lethal injection was a humane and peaceful process. Dr. Zivot also lectures and writes on issues related to end of life care and physician-assisted death, and he and Dunham also discuss ethical issues involving physician participation in executions.
In the November 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Gretchen Engel (pictured), Executive Director of North Carolina’s Center for Death Penalty Litigation (CDPL), joins Ngozi Ndulue, Senior Director of Research and Special Projects at DPIC, for a discussion of their organizations’ recent reports on race and the death penalty. This fall, DPIC released Enduring Injustice: The Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty. Less than a month later, CDPL released its own report, Racist Roots: Origins of North Carolina’s Death Penalty. Though the styles of the two reports are very different, both address the historical ties between the death penalty and white supremacy, slavery, lynchings, and Jim Crow.
In the October 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, former Illinois Governor George Ryan speaks with Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham about the events that persuaded him to commute the death sentences of all 167 death-row prisoners in Illinois in 2003. Ryan and Dunham delve into the Governor’s journey from death-penalty supporter as an Illinois state legislator to death-penalty opponent as Illinois governor, and discuss his new book, co-authored with Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Maurice Possley, Until I Could Be Sure: How I Stopped the Death Penalty in Illinois.
In the September 2020 episode of Discussions With DPIC, Native American Rights Fund senior staff attorney Joel Williams joins Death Penalty Information Center executive director Robert Dunham for a conversation about tribal sovereignty, the death penalty, and the historic U.S. Supreme Court ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma. Williams, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, explains how 2020 has been a landmark year on the question of tribal sovereignty and the death penalty. He and Dunham discuss the impact of McGirt’s affirmance of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s sovereignty over lands within the historical borders of the Creek Reservation, including the voiding of the death sentence imposed in Oklahoma’s state courts on Creek citizen Patrick Dwayne Murphy. Williams then discusses the federal government’s “very troubling” disregard of native sovereignty less than a month later in scheduling and carrying out the execution of Navajo citizen Lezmond Mitchell, the only Native American on federal death row, over the opposition of the Navajo government and tribal leaders across the country.
In the July 2020 episode of Discussions With DPIC, David Fathi, the director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, speaks with DPIC’s Managing Director Anne Holsinger about death-row conditions across the country. Fathi speaks about the “shattering” effects of long-term death-row solitary confinement, the movement away from automatic solitary confinement for death row prisoners, and the impact of COVID-19 in congregate-living circumstances, such as death-row.
In the June 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Henderson Hill (pictured), Senior Counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union Capital Punishment Project, speaks with Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham about North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act. Hill, who has spent decades as a public defender, capital defense attorney, and civil rights advocate, is currently representing North Carolina death-row prisoners in the Racial Justice Act litigation challenging their death sentences.
Hill and Dunham discuss the recent North Carolina Supreme Court rulings in two Racial Justice Act cases that have the potential to change the entire landscape of North Carolina’s death penalty. Hill describes North Carolina’s history of blatant race discrimination in capital cases, how the same types of racial bias that have been found in the North Carolina cases are present in death penalty cases across the country, and the broader meaning the Racial Justice Act cases have at this transformative moment in America’s response to racial injustice.
In the May 2020 edition of Discussions with DPIC, Executive Director Robert Dunham speaks with Kelley Henry, a Supervisory Assistant Federal Public Defender in Nashville, Tennessee who has represented Tennessee death-row prisoners for more than twenty years. They discuss the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on capital litigation, especially the final investigations and clemency efforts that take place in the months leading up to an execution. Henry describes the critical, in-person work that must take place to investigate innocence claims, determine a prisoner’s competency to be executed, and tell a prisoner’s story in a clemency petition, and why it is impossible to adequately perform that work while complying with efforts to protect the public health. She also discusses the danger of performing executions during the pandemic, and the reasons why states should put executions on hold to ensure the health of prisoners, witnesses, and corrections staff.
In the April 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Denver District Attorney Beth McCann (pictured) speaks with Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham about Colorado’s repeal of capital punishment. McCann was elected DA in 2016, as part of a nationwide wave of reform-oriented prosecutors. Both as prosecutor and in her eight years in the Colorado legislature, McCann has advocated for broad criminal justice reforms, including the abolition of the death penalty. In her discussion with Dunham, she describes the major societal shift away from capital punishment, Colorado’s efforts at abolition, and the role of prosecutors in shaping change.Read the transcript here.
In the March 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Hannah Cox (pictured), National Manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty (CCATDP) speaks with Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham about the continuing movement by social and political conservatives away from capital punishment, how the death penalty is out of step with core conservative values, and the key role that conservative legislators are playing in abolition efforts across the U.S.Read CCATDP's 2017 report, The Right Way, describing the growth in conservative sponsorship of death-penalty repeal legislation.
In the February 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, members of Myers’ legal team tell the story of how racial bias, poor representation, and judicial override led to the possible wrongful conviction of an intellectually disabled man. Assistant Federal Defender Kacey Keeton and Investigator Sara Romano speak with DPIC Managing Director Anne Holsinger and describe the shoddy evidence used to convict Myers, his abandonment by his original appellate attorney, and the legal hurdles that have blocked his claims of innocence and intellectual disability from being heard in court.
In the December 2019 edition of the Discussions with DPIC podcast, Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham and Managing Director Anne Holsinger discuss DPIC’s 2019 Year End Report. The podcast explores the major themes presented in the year’s death-penalty news and developments, including innocence, declining use of capital punishment, and systemic problems revealed by the new death sentences and executions in 2019.
Rob Warden and John Seasly speak with Anne Holsinger about their law review article and profile series, “Unrequited Innocence,” which examine death-penalty cases in which prisoners have not been exonerated, despite strong evidence of innocence. Warden, the Executive Director Emeritus of the Center on Wrongful Convictions and a co-founder of both the National Registry of Exonerations and Injustice Watch, and Seasly, a reporter at Injustice Watch, profiled 24 cases involving 25 defendants with “compelling evidence of innocence.” In the podcast, they discuss why they chose to focus on unredressed wrongful convictions, the patterns and themes that emerged in their research, and the remedies that they recommend. Warden and Seasly also address the pernicious impact of false jailhouse informant testimony, the error rate in death-penalty cases, and prosecutors' use of coercive plea deals that permit innocent prisoners to gain their freedom but deny them exoneration and compensation for their years wrongfully incarcerated on death row.
James Rytting, an attorney who represented Texas prisoner Larry Swearingen, describes the junk science used to convict his client. Swearingen was executed on August 21, 2019, after multiple courts declined to consider new evidence that revealed flaws in the forensic evidence presented at trial. Rytting also explains how Swearingen's case highlights flaws that contribute to wrongful convictions throughout the criminal justice system: unscientific analysis of forensic evidence, lack of scientific training for lawyers and judges, and an appellate system that values finality over fairness.
Writer/director Chinonye Chukwu speaks with DPIC Senior Director of Research and Special Projects Ngozi Ndulue about her award-winning new film, Clemency. Chukwu discusses her inspiration for the story, the years-long process of research and immersion that helped her shape the narrative, and her hopes for how this film will be received. Clemency stars Alfre Woodard as death-row prison warden Bernadine Williams and Aldis Hodge as death-row prisoner Anthony Woods. The film focuses on Bernadine, Chukwu explains, and “navigates her emotional and psychological down spiral as she prepares to execute … Woods.” Clemency won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize for Drama at the Sundance Film Festival in February 2019, the first time the award has been given to a movie directed by an African-American woman.
In the latest episode of Discussions with DPIC, New Hampshire State Representative Renny Cushing talks with DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham about the life-altering experience of having a close family member murdered and his journey from being a murder-family survivor to spearheading New Hampshire’s recent repeal of the death penalty. Cushing—whose father and brother-in-law were killed in separate incidents—discusses his ongoing efforts to empower crime survivors and his role working to bring together a broad coalition of people from across the political spectrum and with a variety of life experiences to find common ground in their opposition to capital punishment.
Emmy- and Oscar-winner Edward Zwick speaks about his latest film, Trial By Fire, in the latest episode of Discussions with DPIC. Zwick produced and directed Trial By Fire, which tells the story of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was convicted and sentence to death in 1992 for the alleged arson homicide of his three children. Arson investigators who testified against him used flawed methods, and a jailhouse informant received undisclosed incentives from prosecutors in exchange for his testimony that Willingham had confessed to him, but Willingham was executed in 2004. Willingham’s case featured what Zwick called a “catalog” of problems: “it had the withholding of exculpatory evidence, it had junk science, it had jailhouse snitches who would testify in exchange for reduced sentences, [and] it had a piss-poor public defender.” In an interview with DPIC’s Anne Holsinger, Zwick describes why he decided to tell Willingham’s story, what he learned from the experience, and how he hopes the film will affect audiences. Trial By Fire opens on May 17, 2019.
In the latest episode of Discussions with DPIC, Dr. Katherine Beckett (pictured, left) and Dr. Heather Evans (pictured, right), authors of “The Role of Race in Washington State Capital Sentencing: 1981-2014,” discuss their research and its impact on the Washington Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the state’s death penalty. Their study was heavily cited by the court in State v. Gregory, the October 2018 decision that found Washington’s death penalty violated the state constitution because it was “imposed in an arbitrary and racially biased manner.” The researchers described the factors they examined at various stages of capital sentencing, the major results of their study, and the role of social science research in policymaking.
Robin Konrad, former DPIC Director of Research and Special Projects, joins Executive Director Robert Dunham and current Director of Research and Special Projects Ngozi Ndulue to discuss DPIC's November 2018 report, Behind the Curtain: Secrecy and the Death Penalty in the United States. Konrad, the lead author of the report, gives an overview of the recent expansion of secrecy in the use of the death penalty. She explains the ubiquity of secrecy policies, saying "everybody has some type of secrecy provision" related to the sources of execution drugs or the way executions are carried out. The episode also includes a discussion of the consequences of secrecy, including the ways that it undermines democratic principles of open government and hides problematic state practices. "When we're looking at the government...for the people, by the people, that the people should know what is going on and states shouldn't be hiding information about the most serious punishment that they carry out against their citizens," Konrad says. "I don't see how in any principled system of justice, you can sustain a system that basically is grounded in secrecy, grounded in hiding what's going on from the public. You have to be open, you have to be honest, you have to be transparent, you have to be trustworthy," adds Dunham.
Members of the DPIC staff discuss key themes from the 2018 Year End Report in the latest episode of Discussions with DPIC. Robert Dunham, Ngozi Ndulue, and Anne Holsinger delve into the major death-penalty trends and news items of the year, including the "extended trend" of generational lows in death sentencing and executions, election results that indicate the decline will likely continue, and the possible impact of Pope Francis’s change to Catholic teaching on capital punishment. They explore the reasons for reduced death-penalty usage, highlighting the stories of people who were exonerated in 2018, the theme of executing people with characteristics that make them vulnerable to unfair legal proceedings, and the ongoing controversy surrounding execution methods.
Cardinal Blase Cupich, the ninth Bishop of the Archdiocese of Chicago, speaks with DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham about the implications of the new Catholic Catechism promulgated by Pope Francis, which deemed the death penalty “inadmissible” in all cases and committed the Church to working to abolish capital punishment in the United States and worldwide. Saying “human dignity is at center of all we say and do,” Cardinal Cupich explains how the Church’s commitment to action on the death penalty fits into its broader teachings about social justice and the sanctity of life. “Let’s be honest,” he says. “No life that was taken away can ever be replaced by taking away another life. We cannot teach that killing is wrong by killing.”
Bharat Malkani, senior lecturer in the School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom and author of the 2018 book Slavery and the Death Penalty: A Study in Abolition, speaks with DPIC’s executive director Robert Dunham and Ngozi Ndulue, DPIC’s Director of Research and Special Projects, about the historical links between slavery, lynching, Jim Crow and the death penalty and the lessons modern opponents of capital punishment can learn from the strategies employed by slavery abolitionists. Malkani explores the parallels between the institutional approaches of conservative and moderate anti-slavery activists and the arguments of modern conservatives and contrasts them with the broad morality-based arguments of radical slavery abolitionists, who, he says “fought not just for the abolition of slavery, but for the recognition of the dignity of black people and the equal dignity of black people, alongside whites.” While both types of arguments, Malkani says, have a role to play in efforts to end the death penalty, treating the death penalty solely as a standalone social issue risks further entrenching the social values and racial inequities that more broadly afflict America’s criminal legal system today. “The issue here is not just the problems with the death penalty in practice,” Malkani says, “but the underlying values that lend support for the death penalty….. I think in the longer term, the morality-based arguments, based on a recognition of dignity, will have a greater social impact.”
Keelah Williams, assistant professor of psychology at Hamilton College in New York, speaks with DPIC executive director Robert Dunham about her research on the death penalty and resource scarcity — a concept from evolutionary psychology that studies how people react to social conditions in an environment with limited resources. Williams and a team of researchers from Arizona State University, where she earned her Ph.D., examined the relationship between the actual and perceived scarcity of resources and support for capital punishment. She describes the team’s findings that countries with greater resource scarcity and income inequality were more likely to have a death penalty, as were U.S. states with lower per capita income and shorter life expectancy. She also discusses two experimental studies the team conducted to assess the effects of resource scarcity on individuals’ views of capital punishment. That research found that study participants who had been shown information and images of economic hardship tended to be more supportive of the death penalty than those of the same political ideology and socioeconomic status who had been given information and images about economic prosperity. She explains the results, saying, “If your resources are limited, then you have to be more choosey in how you invest them. So, in the context of punishment decisions, we think this means you become less willing to risk repeated offending, and more favorable towards punishments that eliminate the threat.”
H.E. Miller, Jr. and Bradley MacLean, authors of a recent study on the application of Tennessee's death penalty (https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/study-the-death-penalty-in-tennessee-is-a-cruel-lottery), join DPIC's Anne Holsinger to discuss the findings from their article, Tennessee's Death Penalty Lottery. Miller and MacLean examined whether death sentences and executions in Tennessee are influenced by arbitrary factors like geography, race, and quality of representation. The application of Tennessee's death penalty, they find, is still as unconstitutionally arbitrary as any of the systems that were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in Furman v. Georgia in 1972.
Harvard Law Professor Carol Steiker, co-author of the highly acclaimed book, Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment (https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/books-courting-death-the-supreme-court-and-capital-punishment), joins DPIC’s Robin Konrad for a provocative discussion of the past and future of America’s death penalty. Professor Steiker, who served as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, takes us inside the walls of the court for insights on the justices’ approaches to capital-punishment jurisprudence and the impact of Justice Marshall’s legacy on the Court today. She explains the relationship between lynching and the rise of the modern death penalty in the United States, discusses the plunge in death-penalty usage since the 1990s, and offers thoughts on the future prospects for capital punishment in America.
New York Times Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Nicholas Kristof used the power of his pen to focus national attention on the troubling case of California death-row prisoner, Kevin Cooper and to urge Governor Jerry Brown to authorize DNA testing that could resolve outstanding issues of Cooper’s guilt or innocence. Kristof’s May 20 column in the Sunday Times asked: Was Kevin Cooper Framed for Murder? Mr. Kristof joins DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham to answer that question and to discuss how the Cooper case is the embodiment of some of the most intractable systemic failures in the American death-penalty system. To read Mr. Kristof’s column on Kevin Cooper: https://www.nytimes.com/intera...
Alfred Dewayne Brown was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in 2005 in Harris County, Texas, for the murder of a police officer. Brian Stolarz, attorney and author of the recent novel Grace and Justice on Death Row, represented Brown in his post-conviction appeals and, in 2015, won his freedom. In this podcast, Mr. Stolarz speaks with DPIC’s Robin Konrad about the legal issues in Brown’s case, discussing the culture of conviction and the prosecutorial misconduct that led to Brown’s wrongful conviction. Stolarz offers suggestions that he believes can help protect the innocent from wrongful convictions and death sentences.
Stephen B. Bright, the former President of the Southern Center for Human Rights, discusses the ongoing problem of racial discrimination in jury selection in death-penalty cases—an issue he has argued three times in the U.S. Supreme Court. He speaks with DPIC’s Anne Holsinger about the most recent of those cases, Foster v. Chatman, in which the Court granted Mr. Foster a new trial as a result of intentional discrimination by Columbus, Georgia prosecutors. He explains how the prosecutors' notes, a piece of evidence that is rarely available, were critical in proving that prosecutors had targeted African-American jurors because of their race, and describes newly obtained jury selection notes that show Columbus prosecutors systematically struck African-American jurors in at least seven other capital cases. Mr. Bright explains why current law provides an insufficient remedy for this problem and offers suggestions to prevent the pervasive exclusion of people of color from death-penalty juries.
Lawyer Thomas Carver joins Robin Konrad, DPIC’s Director of Research and Special Projects, to discuss the case of his client, Ulysses Jones, a terminally ill federal prisoner who was charged with capital murder in Springfield, Missouri. Carver, who has been practicing law in Missouri for over forty years, explains what happened in his client’s case, how he and his team avoided a death sentence for their client, and what this case says about broader death-penalty issues in Missouri and the federal court system.
In 2016, both the U.S. Supreme Court and the Florida Supreme Court struck down Florida’s death-sentencing statute. Since then, the Florida courts and legislature have been figuring out how to apply those decisions to the nearly 400 condemned prisoners on the state’s death row. Executive Director Robert Dunham interviews Karen Gottlieb, the Co-Director of the Florida Center for Capital Representation at Florida International University, who discusses the court cases and what has happened in Florida as a result, including explaining how the decision has been interpreted to apply to only half of the prisoners who were unconstitutionally sentenced to death under the old law.
Robin Konrad, DPIC’s Director of Research and Special Projects, interviews University of Virginia law professor Brandon Garrett about his new book End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice. Professor Garrett researched and analyzed all the death sentences imposed in the U.S. during the past 25 years to determine what factors have led to the precipitous decline in the number of people who are being sentenced to death. In this podcast, Professor Garrett discusses these factors, which include a decrease in murder rates, the creation of state-wide public defender offices, and jurors who are increasingly unwilling to return death sentences.
Death penalty proponents have long asserted that capital punishment advances public safety by deterring murders, and this, they say, is especially true when it comes to protecting police officers. The Death Penalty Information Center recently conducted an analysis of murder data from 1987-2015 to determine whether the numbers support that claim. DPIC Fellow Seth Rose speaks with Executive Director Robert Dunham about the DPIC study and what it tells us about the relationship between murder rates, killings of police officers, and the death penalty.
Ohio has not carried out an execution since the botched execution of Dennis McGuire in January 2014, but is scheduled to resume executions on July 26, 2017. In the past several years, the State has revised its lethal-injection protocol and has created a task force that studied Ohio’s death-penalty system. DPIC’s Executive Director Robert Dunham talks with Michael Benza, Senior Instructor in Law at Case Western Reserve University and veteran capital defense attorney, about the results of the task force’s study, the concerns about going forward with executions, and the status of the lethal-injection litigation.
Christina Swarns, litigation director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, speaks with DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham about the case of Texas death-row prisoner Duane Buck and the impact of racial bias on determinations of future dangerousness in death penalty cases. Ms. Swarns represented Mr. Buck in the U.S. Supreme Court in overturning his death sentence after his own lawyer presented an expert witness who gave racially biased testimony that Mr. Buck posed an increased risk of future dangerousness to society because he is black. Ms. Swarns discusses the background of the case and provides context to the racially disparate application of capital punishment in the United States.
In April 2017, Arkansas scheduled a record eight executions in eleven days. Four ultimately were stayed, and four were carried out. DPIC staff members Robin Konrad and Anne Holsinger interview Scott Braden and Julie Vandiver, two of the lawyers who represented the condemned Arkansas prisoners. Scott and Julie discuss the legal issues in the cases, describe the controversial executions, and explain what comes next for the prisoners whose executions were stayed. CONTENT NOTE: This episode contains detailed descriptions of executions, which some listeners may find disturbing.
DPIC staff members Robert Dunham, Robin Konrad, and Anne Holsinger explain Arkansas' plan to execute seven prisoners over an 11-day period beginning April 17. They discuss the state's reasons for the condensed execution schedule, current litigation related to lethal injection drugs, and the risks of this unprecedented rate of executions. Additional background information on the Arkansas' executions is available here.
In observance of Women's History Month, DPIC staff members Anne Holsinger and Robin Konrad interview Mary Atwell, Ph.D., one of the nation’s foremost experts on women on death row. Dr. Atwell is Professor Emerita of Criminal Justice at Radford University and author of three books on capital punishment, most recently Wretched Sisters: Examining Gender and Capital Punishment. The podcast discusses Dr. Atwell's research and highlights the themes and patterns present in capital murder cases in which women were the defendants.
Robin Konrad, Director of Research and Special Projects, interviews Isaiah McCoy, the nation's 157th death-row exoneree, and his lawyers, Michael Wiseman and Herbert Mondros. McCoy was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in Delaware in 2012. After winning a new trial in 2015, he was acquitted of all charges in January 2017. McCoy's case featured several systemic problems that plague the death penalty system: a lack of physical evidence, eyewitnesses who received deals from the prosecutor and told multiple versions of the story about the crime, a non-unanimous jury recommendation for a death sentence, and a prosecutor whose misconduct in the case was so outrageous that he was suspended from practicing law. McCoy and his lawyers explain how these factors contributed to his wrongful conviction, discuss his efforts to be exonerated, and describe McCoy's life since exoneration.
DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham and Director of Research and Special Projects Robin Konrad discuss the findings and themes of the 2016 DPIC Year End Report. This year marked historic lows in death sentences, executions, and public support for the death penalty. They explore the reasons for the declines, look at what this year's election results say about the death penalty, and describe the cases that resulted in executions this year.
As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to hear oral argument in Moore v. Texas and consider the constitutionality of the state’s approach to deciding whether a defendant is intellectually disabled, Cornell Law School Professor John Blume joins us to share his expertise on intellectual disability and the death penalty. He provides context on the Supreme Court's 2002 decision, Atkins v. Virginia, which banned the execution of defendants with intellectual disabilities, and describes the clinical criteria used in most determinations of intellectual disability. In the second half of the conversation, Professor Blume explains Texas' idiosyncratic method for determining intellectual disability, the background of the Moore case, and how the Court's decision in Moore may affect the death penalty system in Texas and other states.
Law professor and author John Bessler joins DPIC executive director Robert Dunham to discuss "Against the Death Penalty," a book version of Justice Stephen Breyer's historic dissent in Glossip v. Gross in which he questions the constitutionality of the death penalty. Professor Bessler edited the book and wrote an extensive introduction explaining the significance of the opinion. In a wide-ranging conversation, Bessler and Dunham discuss the dissent itself, the national context of the decision, and the possible effects of an 8-member Supreme Court.
Today, DPIC launches a new podcast series, "Discussions With DPIC," which will feature monthly, unscripted conversations with death penalty experts on a wide variety of topics. The inaugural episode features a conversation between Texas Defender Services staff attorney Kate Black and DPIC host Anne Holsinger, who discuss the case of Jeffrey Wood and Texas' unusual legal doctrine known as the "law of parties." Wood's case garnered national media attention because he was sentenced to death despite having neither killed anyone nor even intended that a killing take place. His execution, which had been scheduled for August 24, was stayed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to permit him to litigate a challenge to the prosecution's use of scientifically invalid predictions of future dangerousness by a psychiatrist who had been expelled from state and national psychiatric associations for similarly improper testimony in the past. In the podcast, Black explains the law of parties and its application in Wood's case, and discusses how the national dialogue that developed around Wood's case may affect the death penalty in the future.
This podcast discusses the history of the death penalty in Arkansas, how it is carried out in the state, and executive and legislative efforts to repeal or reintroduce capital punishment. Arkansas’ use of the death penalty has mirrored the politics of race in the state, and the podcast explores some sensitive issues relating to racial bias, lynching, and capital punishment. It also discusses the state’s reenactment of the death penalty after Furman v. Georgia and current issues with lethal injection drugs.
Connecticut had an infamous history as far as the death penalty was concerned. Connecticut is believed to have executed a 12 year-old in 1786 -- the youngest person ever executed in the history of the United States. Legal issues have yet to resolve the status of Connecticut's current death row population, despite the death penalty being abolished in Connecticut in 2012.
Illinois had a long history of racial bias in its implementation of the death penalty. Numerous studies and commissions led to the Illinois State Legislature abolishing capital punishment in the state in 2011.
The emptying of death row by Governor Tony Anaya in 1986 set the tone for the erosion of support for the death penalty in New Mexico. As a state with a growing Roman Catholic and non-white population, the shifting demographics became apparent in 2009 when Gov. Richardson asked his constituents for feedback on death penalty abolition.
New York carried out more executions than any state other than Virgina between 1608 and 1972. However, in the 1960s, the state legislature began to chip away at what constituted a capital crime. In 2004, the state's highest court declared the death penalty violates the state constitution due to arbitrariness and a state appellate court effectively vacated death row in 2007.
In 2006, New Jersey became the first state to legislatively impose a moratorium on executions. This moratorium would be the precursor to the state's abolition of the death penalty in 2007.
A capital murder trial wrought with prejudice in the 18th century set the foundation for a state that would abolish the death penalty twice in the next 200 years. This abolitionist culture led to controversy when Governor Lincoln Chafee refused to transfer a murder suspect to Federal custody.
The District of Columbia is a special area that has oversight on both the local and federal levels. This unique status has led to a dynamic with the death penalty that is not found in any state in the US.
Massachusetts has a long history of capital punishment ever since it was an English colony in the 17th century. However, a famous case involving two Italian immigrants may have been the turning point against capital punishment in Massachusetts.
"Uncivilized and impossible to enforce." This was the sentiment of Iowa in 1872 when the state initially abolished capital punishment. What followed was a series of events that led to the reinstatement, and second abolition of the death penalty.
Vermont has a long history of sparse use of capital punishment and saw a steady decline in the scope of crimes that were punishable by death throughout the years. The death penalty was rendered invalid in 1972 by Furman v. Georgia and has never been reinstated since.
In the late 19th century, as Hawaii became a center of agricultural production, the immigrants who were brought to the islands in a form of indentured servitude bore the brunt of the arbitrariness of the judicial system in annexed Hawaii.
Alaska was under territorial and colonial rule from the 18th century through 1959, when it became a state. This long history of outside influence, in addition to several other unique aspects of Alaska, have played an important role in the attitudes towards the death penalty there.
North Dakota's residents signed a petition in 1915 about the "barbarous" and "ineffective". That very year, the North Dakota legislature passed a bill repealing the death penalty and it has remained off the books ever since.
Minnesota became the 4th state to abolish the death penalty after a short history of capital punishment filled with questions about the fairness of a murder trial as well as the largest mass hanging in US history.
A series of botched hangings led to the state of Maine reexamining its use of the death penalty. The state abolished the death penalty in 1876, but it was reinstated for a few years after a series of "cold-blooded murders". The state abolished the death penalty again in 1883, and has not reinstated it since.
In 1853, Wisconsin became the first state to abolish the death penalty for all crimes, including treason.
In 1847, Michigan became the first English speaking jurisdiction and first U.S. state to abolish the death penalty.
Lethal Injection 2 - A discussion of recent changes to lethal injection protocol in response to drug shortages.
Arbitrariness and the Constitution - Interview with University of Baltimore Law School professor John Bessler on arbitrariness and the history of the death penalty.
Interview with Jennifer Whitfield of Covington and Burling regarding the recent release of Alabama death row inmate Larry Smith.
Interview with Michael Fox discussing issues surrounding the death penalty in Japan, including public attitudes towards the death penalty, the way the criminal justice system works and the efforts of abolitionist groups.
Discusses general issues of the death penalty in America: recent trends, application against minority defendants, support among Hispanics as well as the international use of the death penalty. Presented in Spanish.
Discusses the international context of the American death penalty, including international trends in capital punishment and how international opinion affects the death penalty in the U.S.
A summary of topics relating to death row, including discussion of death row statistics and procedures.
A summary of the role of the Supreme Court in the death penalty, including discussion of major decisions by the court on capital punishment.
A summary of the legal process involved in a death sentence, including jury selection and the appeals process.
Covers some of the history of executed women in America, as well as issues of gender bias and differences among genders in support for the death penalty.
Covers the definition of mental illness, Supreme Court rulings related to insanity, mental illness and intellectual disability, and examples of severely mentally ill inmates who have been executed.
Covers the history of lethal injection, involvement of medical professionals, court rulings, and recent problems with drug availability and protocol changes.
Answers readers' questions on criminological theories, methods of execution, costs, and the future of the death penalty.
Answers readers' questions on how prosecutors decide to seek the death penalty, death-qualified juries, DNA testing, and Americans on death row in other countries.
Covers the variety of victims' families' reactions to the death penalty, the role of victim's family members in sentencing decisions, and victim impact statements.
Covers the importance of high-quality representation and provides examples of inadequate representation in capital cases including statistics and individual cases. Featured music: "Every Waking Hour" by Robin Grey and "Death of Lovers" by John Hall, both licensed under Creative Commons.
Covers issues of race in the death penalty, such as whether race plays a role in criminal sentencing, analysis of race statistics in the justice system and measures intended to prevent racial factors in sentencing. Featured music: "Every Waking Hour" by Robin Grey and "Death of Lovers" by John Hall, both licensed under Creative Commons.
Covers issues of innocence in the death penalty, such as the possibility of innocent people sentenced to death, and whether the judicial process prevents wrongful execution. Featured music: "Every Waking Hour" by Robin Grey and "Death of Lovers" by John Hall, both licensed under Creative Commons.
Covers issues of deterrence, including views of police and criminologists about the deterrent effect of executions and statistical analysis of deterrence effects. Featured music: "Every Waking Hour" by Robin Grey and "Death of Lovers" by John Hall, both licensed under Creative Commons.
Covers issues of cost in the criminal justice system, such as explaining the cost of a death penalty sentence versus life without parole, and the factors that influence the cost of execution. Featured music: "Every Waking Hour" by Robin Grey and "Death of Lovers" by John Hall, both licensed under Creative Commons.
Covers issues such as how clemency works in the criminal justice system, including who grants clemency, why clemency is granted, and how often it occurs. Featured music: "Hopscotch" by Orb Gettarr and "Death of Lovers" by John Hall, both licensed under Creative Commons.
Covers issues such as geographic and racial disparities in death penalty sentencing, as well as exploring why people get different sentences for similar crimes. Featured music: "Hopscotch" by Orb Gettarr and "Death of Lovers" by John Hall, both licensed under Creative Commons.