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THE DEATH PENALTY IN THE USA

Published by Beryl Dawson Modified over 6 years ago

Presentation on theme: "THE DEATH PENALTY IN THE USA"— Presentation transcript:

Trends in Number of High School Graduates: National

PARTISAN CONTROL AND STATE DECISIONS ABOUT OBAMACARE FULL GO STATES (n = 22) Arkansas Michigan CALIFORNIA MINNESOTA COLORADO NEVADA CONNECTICUT New Hampshire.

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TOTAL CASES FILED IN MAINE PER 1,000 POPULATION CALENDAR YEARS FILINGS PER 1,000 POPULATION This chart shows bankruptcy filings relative to.

The Death Penalty 8 th Amendment – Cruel and Unusual Punishment?

BINARY CODING. Alabama Arizona California Connecticut Florida Hawaii Illinois Iowa Kentucky Maine Massachusetts Minnesota Missouri 0 Nebraska New Hampshire.

U.S. Civil War Map On a current map of the U.S. identify and label the Union States, the Confederate States, and U.S. territories. Create a map key and.

8 th Amendment.  Punishment must fit the crime  Punishments should not violate decency standards “Excessive bail shall not be required nor excessive.

This chart compares the percentage of cases filed in Maine under chapter 13 with the national average between 1999 and As a percent of total filings,

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Map Review. California Kentucky Alabama.

Judicial Circuits. If You Live In This State This Is Your Judicial Circuit Alabama11th Circuit Alaska 9th Circuit Arkansas 8th Circuit Arizona 9th Circuit.

1. AFL-CIO What percentage of the funds received by Alabama K-12 public schools in school year was provided by the state of Alabama? a)44% b)53%

The United States.

Directions: Label Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia--- then color.

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CHAPTER 7 FILINGS IN MAINE CALENDAR YEARS 1999 – 2009 CALENDAR YEAR CHAPTER 7 FILINGS This chart shows total case filings in Maine for calendar years 1999.

Study Cards The East (12) Study Cards The East (12) New Hampshire New York Massachusetts Delaware Connecticut New Jersey Rhode Island Rhode Island Maryland.

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10 facts about the death penalty in the U.S.

Most U.S. adults support the death penalty for people convicted of murder, according to an April 2021 Pew Research Center survey . At the same time, majorities believe the death penalty is not applied in a racially neutral way, does not deter people from committing serious crimes and does not have enough safeguards to prevent an innocent person from being executed.

Use of the death penalty has gradually declined in the United States in recent decades. A growing number of states have abolished it, and death sentences and executions have become less common. But the story is not one of continuous decline across all levels of government. While state-level executions have decreased, the federal government put more prisoners to death under President Donald Trump than at any point since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.

As debates over the death penalty continue in the U.S. , here’s a closer look at public opinion on the issue, as well as key facts about the nation’s use of capital punishment.

This Pew Research Center analysis examines public opinion about the death penalty in the United States and explores how the nation has used capital punishment in recent decades.

The public opinion findings cited here are based primarily on a Pew Research Center survey of 5,109 U.S. adults, conducted from April 5 to 11, 2021. Everyone who took part in the survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology . Here are the questions used from this survey, along with responses, and its methodology .

Findings about the administration of the death penalty – including the number of states with and without capital punishment, the annual number of death sentences and executions, the demographics of those on death row and the average amount of time spent on death row – come from the Death Penalty Information Center and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Six-in-ten U.S. adults strongly or somewhat favor the death penalty for convicted murderers, according to the April 2021 survey. A similar share (64%) say the death penalty is morally justified when someone commits a crime like murder.

A bar chart showing that the majority of Americans favor the death penalty, but nearly eight-in-ten see ‘some risk’ of executing the innocent

Support for capital punishment is strongly associated with the view that it is morally justified in certain cases. Nine-in-ten of those who favor the death penalty say it is morally justified when someone commits a crime like murder; only a quarter of those who oppose capital punishment see it as morally justified.

A majority of Americans have concerns about the fairness of the death penalty and whether it serves as a deterrent against serious crime. More than half of U.S. adults (56%) say Black people are more likely than White people to be sentenced to death for committing similar crimes. About six-in-ten (63%) say the death penalty does not deter people from committing serious crimes, and nearly eight-in-ten (78%) say there is some risk that an innocent person will be executed.

Opinions about the death penalty vary by party, education and race and ethnicity. Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are much more likely than Democrats and Democratic leaners to favor the death penalty for convicted murderers (77% vs. 46%). Those with less formal education are also more likely to support it: Around two-thirds of those with a high school diploma or less (68%) favor the death penalty, compared with 63% of those with some college education, 49% of those with a bachelor’s degree and 44% of those with a postgraduate degree. Majorities of White (63%), Asian (63%) and Hispanic adults (56%) support the death penalty, but Black adults are evenly divided, with 49% in favor and 49% opposed.

Views of the death penalty differ by religious affiliation . Around two-thirds of Protestants in the U.S. (66%) favor capital punishment, though support is much higher among White evangelical Protestants (75%) and White non-evangelical Protestants (73%) than it is among Black Protestants (50%). Around six-in-ten Catholics (58%) also support capital punishment, a figure that includes 61% of Hispanic Catholics and 56% of White Catholics.

Atheists oppose the death penalty about as strongly as Protestants favor it

Opposition to the death penalty also varies among the religiously unaffiliated. Around two-thirds of atheists (65%) oppose it, as do more than half of agnostics (57%). Among those who say their religion is “nothing in particular,” 63% support capital punishment.

Support for the death penalty is consistently higher in online polls than in phone polls. Survey respondents sometimes give different answers depending on how a poll is conducted. In a series of contemporaneous Pew Research Center surveys fielded online and on the phone between September 2019 and August 2020, Americans consistently expressed more support for the death penalty in a self-administered online format than in a survey administered on the phone by a live interviewer. This pattern was more pronounced among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents than among Republicans and GOP leaners, according to an analysis of the survey results .

Phone polls have shown a long-term decline in public support for the death penalty. In phone surveys conducted by Pew Research Center between 1996 and 2020, the share of U.S. adults who favor the death penalty fell from 78% to 52%, while the share of Americans expressing opposition rose from 18% to 44%. Phone surveys conducted by Gallup found a similar decrease in support for capital punishment during this time span.

A majority of states have the death penalty, but far fewer use it regularly. As of July 2021, the death penalty is authorized by 27 states and the federal government – including the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. military – and prohibited in 23 states and the District of Columbia, according to the Death Penalty Information Center . But even in many of the jurisdictions that authorize the death penalty, executions are rare: 13 of these states, along with the U.S. military, haven’t carried out an execution in a decade or more. That includes three states – California , Oregon and Pennsylvania – where governors have imposed formal moratoriums on executions.

A map showing that most states have the death penalty, but significantly fewer use it regularly

A growing number of states have done away with the death penalty in recent years, either through legislation or a court ruling. Virginia, which has carried out more executions than any state except Texas since 1976, abolished capital punishment in 2021. It followed Colorado (2020), New Hampshire (2019), Washington (2018), Delaware (2016), Maryland (2013), Connecticut (2012), Illinois (2011), New Mexico (2009), New Jersey (2007) and New York (2004).

Death sentences have steadily decreased in recent decades. There were 2,570 people on death row in the U.S. at the end of 2019, down 29% from a peak of 3,601 at the end of 2000, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). New death sentences have also declined sharply: 31 people were sentenced to death in 2019, far below the more than 320 who received death sentences each year between 1994 and 1996. In recent years, prosecutors in some U.S. cities – including Orlando and Philadelphia – have vowed not to seek the death penalty, citing concerns over its application.

Nearly all (98%) of the people who were on death row at the end of 2019 were men. Both the mean and median age of the nation’s death row population was 51. Black prisoners accounted for 41% of death row inmates, far higher than their 13% share of the nation’s adult population that year. White prisoners accounted for 56%, compared with their 77% share of the adult population. (For both Black and White Americans, these figures include those who identify as Hispanic. Overall, about 15% of death row prisoners in 2019 identified as Hispanic, according to BJS.)

A line graph showing that death sentences, executions have trended downward in U.S. since late 1990s

Annual executions are far below their peak level. Nationally, 17 people were put to death in 2020, the fewest since 1991 and far below the modern peak of 98 in 1999, according to BJS and the Death Penalty Information Center. The COVID-19 outbreak disrupted legal proceedings in much of the country in 2020, causing some executions to be postponed .

Even as the overall number of executions in the U.S. fell to a 29-year low in 2020, the federal government ramped up its use of the death penalty. The Trump administration executed 10 prisoners in 2020 and another three in January 2021; prior to 2020, the federal government had carried out a total of three executions since 1976.

The Biden administration has taken a different approach from its predecessor. In July 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered a halt in federal executions while the Justice Department reviews its policies and procedures.

A line graph showing that prisoners executed in 2019 spent an average of 22 years on death row

The average time between sentencing and execution in the U.S. has increased sharply since the 1980s. In 1984, the average time between sentencing and execution was 74 months, or a little over six years, according to BJS . By 2019, that figure had more than tripled to 264 months, or 22 years. The average prisoner awaiting execution at the end of 2019, meanwhile, had spent nearly 19 years on death row.

A variety of factors explain the increase in time spent on death row, including lengthy legal appeals by those sentenced to death and challenges to the way states and the federal government carry out executions, including the drugs used in lethal injections. In California, more death row inmates have died from natural causes or suicide than from executions since 1978, according to the state’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation .

Note: This is an update to a post originally published May 28, 2015.

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Death Penalty

John Gramlich is an associate director at Pew Research Center .

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Crime & Law Enforcement

Death penalty in the United States - Statistics & Facts

Methods of execution, opinions on the death penalty, key insights.

Detailed statistics

U.S. capital punishment - number of prisoners under sentence of death 2020, by state

U.S. capital punishment - executions per year 1990-2020

U.S. capital punishment - death sentences 2020, by ethnicity

Editor’s Picks Current statistics on this topic

Current statistics on this topic.

Justice System

Number of executions in the United States 2015-2023

U.S. capital punishment - share of prisoners with a death sentence 2020, by gender

Opinion of U.S. citizens on the death penalty 1936-2022

Recommended statistics

Prisoners on death row.

Premium Statistic U.S. capital punishment - number of prisoners under sentence of death 2020, by state
Premium Statistic Number of prisoners under sentence of death U.S. 2020, by ethnicity
Premium Statistic U.S. capital punishment - death sentences 2020, by ethnicity
Basic Statistic Number of prisoners removed from death row U.S. 2020, by ethnicity
Basic Statistic U.S. capital punishment - share of prisoners with a death sentence 2020, by gender
Basic Statistic U.S. capital punishment - prisoners under sentence of death 2020, by age
Basic Statistic U.S. capital punishment - prisoners on death row 2020, by education
Basic Statistic U.S. capital punishment - prisoners on death row 2020, by marital status

Number of prisoners under sentence of death in the United States in 2020, by state

Number of prisoners under sentence of death U.S. 2020, by ethnicity

Number of prisoners in the U.S. with a death sentence in 2020, by ethnicity

Number of prisoners in the United States received under sentence of death in 2020, by ethnicity

Number of prisoners removed from death row U.S. 2020, by ethnicity

Number of prisoners removed from death row in the United States in 2020, by ethnicity

Share of prisoners under sentence of death in the United States in 2020, by gender

U.S. capital punishment - prisoners under sentence of death 2020, by age

Share of prisoners under sentence of death in the United States at year-end 2020, by age group

U.S. capital punishment - prisoners on death row 2020, by education

Share of prisoners under sentence of death in the United States in 2020, by educational attainment

U.S. capital punishment - prisoners on death row 2020, by marital status

Share of prisoners under sentence of death in the United States in 2020, by marital status

Executions in the U.S.

Basic Statistic Number of executions in the United States 2015-2023
Premium Statistic U.S. capital punishment - executions per year 1990-2020
Premium Statistic U.S. capital punishment - executions per year 2000-2021, by ethnicity
Basic Statistic U.S. capital punishment - executions 1976-2023, by method
Basic Statistic U.S. capital punishment - total executions 1976-2022, by state
Basic Statistic U.S. capital punishment - time elapsed between sentencing and execution 1990-2020

Number of executions in the United States from 2015 to 2023, by state

Number of prisoners under sentence of death executed per year in the United States from 1990 to 2020

U.S. capital punishment - executions per year 2000-2021, by ethnicity

Number of prisoners under sentence of death executed in the United States from 2000 to 2021, by ethnicity

U.S. capital punishment - executions 1976-2023, by method

Total number of executions in the United States from 1976 to 2023, by method of execution

U.S. capital punishment - total executions 1976-2022, by state

Total number of executions in the United States from 1976 to 2022, by state

U.S. capital punishment - time elapsed between sentencing and execution 1990-2020

Average time between sentencing and execution for inmates on death row in the United States from 1990 to 2020 (in months)

Opinion on death penalty

Basic Statistic Public assessment of crime as a serious issue U.S. 2000-2021
Basic Statistic Opinion of U.S. citizens on the death penalty 1936-2022
Basic Statistic Americans' moral stance towards the death penalty in 2023

Public assessment of crime as a serious issue U.S. 2000-2021

Percentage of the U.S. population that assesses crime as a serious problem from 2000 to 2021, nationwide and local

Are you in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder?

Americans' moral stance towards the death penalty in 2023

Do you think the death penalty is morally acceptable or morally wrong?

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Death Penalty

Evaluating the effectiveness of Capital Punishment

I. Capital Punishment: A sanction in which a person loses the right to live.�

1. The History of Capital Punishment

1 st written record of death penalty was seen in Hammurabi’s code.
Based on the principle of “Eye for an eye”

2. Methods of execution in history

The Brazen bull

* Used in Ancient Greece

b. Crucifixion

Person was killed through exposure or asphyxiation (inability to breathe)
Utilized mostly in Roman Empire

c. Head detachment

Used in France

Map of Death Penalty around the world today

Map of the Death Penalty in USA

(Notes Continued): c. The Death Penalty in the United States

37 States have the Death Penalty
13 states do not

a. 4 Methods .of execution used in the United States

Hanging is still used in Delaware and Washington as an option to lethal injection

2. Firing Squad

3. Gas Chamber

4. Lethal Injection

III. 2 Problems that need to be fixed

Problem #1: Innocent people have been executed

Exonerated: when a person on death row is released/freed after new evidence revealed their innocence

(Walter McMillan being exonerated)

a. Exoneration #’s

As of October 13, 2015 there have been 156 exonerations in 26 different States.

Problem #2: There is evidence of Racial/social class Bias in the application of the Death Penalty .

* Bias is defined as an unfair slant towards a specific viewpoint�

a. Evidence of victim Bias based on race

"In 82% of the studies [reviewed], race of the victim was found to influence the likelihood of being charged with capital murder or receiving the death penalty, i.e., those who murdered whites were found more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murdered blacks." - United States General Accounting Office, Death Penalty Sentencing, February 1990

Executions for Interracial Murders

The cases represented here demonstrate victim bias:
White Defendant / Black Victim (31)
Black Defendant / White Victim (295)

Current U.S. Death Row Population by Race

BLACK: 1243 people or 41.66%
LATINO: 385 people or 12.90%
WHITE: 1275 people or 42.73%

Death Row Population Figures from NAACP-LDF " Death Row USA (July 1, 2015)"�

Does Stanley Williams deserve the death penalty?

What evidence does the film provide us that demonstrates Stan is a changed man?

Other option: Clemency/Commutation of sentence

In legal terms this means a reduction of charges . In Stan’s case, this would require removing him from Death Row.
Should this have been done? What evidence would you use to back up your claim.

Read the excerpt from Stan’s Book

Computer Lab

4 questions to consider

Does the Death Penalty deter murder?

* Deterrence – to reduce crime

The Death Penalty in America

Acs resources and analysis, acs condemns the death penalty, acs death penalty statements, videos: acs death penalty events, death penalty resources.

The American Constitution Society advocates for the abolition of the death penalty. We condemn the cruelty and racism inherent in the death penalty and provide programming and resources to help foster greater understanding of the racial disparities and constitutional problems in the administration of the death penalty.

In July 2020, after a 17-year moratorium, the U.S. Justice Department resumed executions of federal prisoners sentenced to death. This led to an unprecedented killing spree that, in six short months, resulted in thirteen executions, including six Black men, and the only woman and only Native American on federal death row. But momentum for death penalty abolition is increasing, in part due to a national reckoning with the racially unjust administration of the death penalty and the litany of exonerations of people previously sentenced to death (170 and counting).

As a candidate, President Biden declared that, “Because we can’t ensure that we get these cases right every time, we must eliminate the death penalty.” The Biden-Harris administration now has an opportunity to lead, and secure the president’s legacy, by commuting the death sentences of the remaining forty-six men on federal death row and setting an example for the rest of the nation.

ACS has and will continue to hold national and chapter events about the lack of effective representation for the accused, the use of junk science, unjust and unnecessary limits on judicial review, as well as the institutional racism that plagues our criminal legal systems and the death penalty. We will continue to advocate for the commutation of federal death row and the abolition of this archaic practice, both federally and at the state level.

Killing of Corey Johnson, Dustin Higgs Cements Administration’s Cruel, Deadly and Racist Legacy (January 15, 2021)
ACS President Condemns Execution of Lisa Montgomery, First Woman Executed by U.S. in 67 Years (January 13, 2021)
Trump Administration Should Halt Executions (December 10, 2020)
Orlando Hall’s Execution Continues Administration’s Unprecedented Blood Lust at the Expense of Justic e (November 20, 2020)
Christopher Vialva is First Man in 70 Years to be Executed for Crimes Committed as a Teenager (September 24, 2020)
William LeCroy’s Execution Part of “Stunning and Disturbing Trends” (September 22, 2020)
Keith Nelson’s Execution Was No Act of Justice (August 28, 2020)
Extinguishing Lezmond Mitchell’s Life Was A Horrible Choice (August 26, 2020)
Dustin Honken Executed (July 17, 2020)
Wesley Purkey’s Execution Is an Affront to the U.S. Constitution and the Supreme Court’s Own Precedent (July 16, 2020)
Daniel Lewis Lee Executed: First Federal Execution in 17 Years (July 14, 2020)
Just Ahead of First Federal Executions in 17 Years, ACS President Russ Feingold Condemns the Cruelty and Racism Inherent in the Death Penalty (July 9, 2020)

ACS President Russ Feingold’s Opening Remarks at The 8th World Congress Against The Death Penalty

November 15, 2022

ACS President Russ Feingold on the Federal Death Penalty

November 19, 2020

Is the End in Sight? The Questionable Future of Capital Punishment in America

ACS Webinar, November 19, 2020

For the first time in our nation’s history, half of all states in the country have either outright banned or declared moratoria on capital punishment. Even in states that maintain the death penalty, capital prosecutions and executions have steadily declined in recent years, with just four counties in Texas and one in Missouri accounting for over fifty percent of executions in the past ten years. At the same time, support for capital punishment is at a near half-century low, with sixty percent of Americans supporting life in prison over the death penalty. What do these trends tell us about the future of the death penalty in America? Can we continue to justify its use as we attempt to reckon with the estimated 170 people previously sentenced to death who have been exonerated and the overwhelming evidence of racism in its application? When a penalty is imposed so infrequently and seemingly arbitrarily based on geography, race, and even happenstance, can it survive good-faith constitutional scrutiny?

Speakers: Maurice Chammah , Staff Writer for the Marshall Project, Author of the forthcoming book Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty ; Terrica Redfield Ganzy , Deputy Director at the Southern Center for Human Rights; Sam Kamin , Professor of Law at University of Denver, Sturm College of Law; Laura Porter , Executive Director of the 8th Amendment Project; and Russ Feingold , ACS President, Moderator.

A Fear of Too Much Justice: Confronting Systemic Racism in the Death Penalty

ACS Webinar, October 1, 2020

Half a century after Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart decried systemic racism in the administration of the death penalty, Black, Latinx, and Native American people continue to be disproportionately represented on the federal and state death rows. Meanwhile, crimes against white victims are the ones for which the death penalty are overwhelmingly sought. And yet, for the past thirty years, the U.S. Supreme Court has thwarted efforts to challenge systemic racism in the death penalty based on what Justice William Brennan characterized as “a fear of too much justice.”

Join the American Constitution Society for an examination of what led to and perpetuates the stark racial disparities in the death penalty and how can they be addressed at both the state and federal level.

Speakers: Catherine M. Grosso , Professor of Law, Michigan State University; Henderson Hill , Senior Counsel, ACLU Capital Punishment Project; Alexis Hoag , Associate Research Scholar in the Faculty of Law; Lecturer in Law, Columbia Law School; and Liliana Segura , Senior Reporter, The Intercept , Moderator

Tinkering with the Machinery of Death: Resuming Federal Executions

ACS Webinar, July 9, 2020

Experts discuss the reasons for the nearly 20-year moratorium on federal executions, and the concerns over this quick succession of executions planned for this summer in the face of continued criticism that the death penalty is arbitrary, racially biased, and plagued by poor, under-resourced lawyering.

Speakers: Gary Tyler , Former Death Row Inmate, Outreach and Engagement Support Worker, Safe Place for Youth; Miriam Gohara , Clinical Associate Professor of Law, Yale Law School; Megan McCracken , Eighth Amendment Resource Counsel; and Russ Feingold , ACS President, Moderator.

The Dangers of Injecting Secrecy into the Death Penalty

ACS National Convention, 2015

Speakers: Adam Liptak , Supreme Court Correspondent, The New York Times; Mark Earley , Founder and Principal, Earley Legal Group; Member, Death Penalty Committee, The Constitution Project; Tanya Greene , Advocacy and Policy Counsel, American Civil Liberties Union; Megan McCracken , Eighth Amendment Resource Counsel; Katie Townsend , Litigation Director, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

ACS Expert Forum Blogs and Op-Eds

Russ Feingold & Christopher Wright Durocher, A Week of Death Begs for Death Penalty Abolition (2022)
Russ Feingold, It’s Time to End the Federal Death Penalty And Empty Death Row (2021)
Stephen Larson, As a former federal prosecutor and judge, I believe Lisa Montgomery deserves clemency (2021)
Gary McClung, Jr., I served on Brandon Bernard’s jury, and I believe his death sentence is wrong (2020)
Frances Miles, Respect Jurors (2020)
Rebecca E. Woodman, Wesley Purkey’s Execution Should Shock America’s Conscience (2020)
Russ Feingold & Keith Harper, Another broken promise by the United States (2020)
Frederick Gedicks, Dunn v. Ray: We Should Have Seen This Coming (2019)
Ron Honberg, Executing People with Serious Mental Illness — Like Wesley Purkey — Is Wrong (2019)
Brandon Garrett, An End for a Rare, Biased Penalty (2018)
Richard Lorenc, Jury’s Anti-Gay Prejudice Must Not Send a Man to His Death (2018)
SprearIt, Repackaging Abolition: Targeting Christians, Conservatives (2017)
Emily Olson-Gault, “Show me the proof…before you can get the proof”: Ayestas offers the Court the chance to fix a paradoxical and unfair standard in death penalty cases (2017)

ACS Resources

John H. Blume and Brendan Van Winkle, Death Penalty: Determine If Capital Punishment Has Outlived Its Use (2020)
American Constitution Society Program Guide, Combatting Anti-Black Racism Through Law and Policy (2020)

Broken Law Episode

Episode 3 – In Pursuit of Death Penalty Abolition
Episode 23 – How the World Views the Death Penalty

Issue Briefs

Eve Primus, Litigating Federal Habeas Corpus Cases: One Equitable Gateway at a Time (2018)
Scott Phillips, Hire a Lawyer, Escape the Death Penalty (2010)

SCOTUS Review Journal

Carol Steiker & Jordan Steiker, Capital Punishment in the Supreme Court 2018 Term (2019)

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A-Z Publications

Annual Review of Criminology

Volume 3, 2020, review article, the rise, fall, and afterlife of the death penalty in the united states.

Carol S. Steiker 1 , and Jordan M. Steiker 2
View Affiliations Hide Affiliations Affiliations: 1 Harvard Law School, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA; email: [email protected] 2 University of Texas School of Law, University of Texas, Austin, Texas 78705, USA; email: [email protected]
Vol. 3:299-315 (Volume publication date January 2020) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-criminol-011518-024721
Copyright © 2020 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

This review addresses four key issues in the modern (post-1976) era of capital punishment in the United States. First, why has the United States retained the death penalty when all its peer countries (all other developed Western democracies) have abolished it? Second, how should we understand the role of race in shaping the distinctive path of capital punishment in the United States, given our country's history of race-based slavery and slavery's intractable legacy of discrimination? Third, what is the significance of the sudden and profound withering of the practice of capital punishment in the past two decades? And, finally, what would abolition of the death penalty in the United States (should it ever occur) mean for the larger criminal justice system?

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Article Type: Review Article

Publications

Resource hub.

Please find below a series of lectures from world-class capital defenders. New lectures are frequently added to the Hub. Transcripts in English as well as in French are available for most lectures.

Effective Representation, The Right to Release and Bail, False and Involuntary Confessions, Plea Negotiation, An Introduction to Mitigation, Opening Statements, Cross-examination, Mental Health and Intellectual Disability, Litigating Trauma, Representing Foreign Nationals, Representing Women, Working with the media and social media, Storytelling, Narrative, and Persuasion, Appeals.

Effective Representation by Celia Rumman

Celia Rumann is a Professor, criminal defense lawyer, and filmmaker focused on teaching and research in the areas of human rights and methods used to combat terrorism, such as torture. She is a co-author of “Federal Sentencing Law and Practice” (Thompson Reuters). She has authored and co-authored a number of articles including “Tortured History: Finding our Way Back to the Lost Origins of the Eighth Amendment” in the Pepperdine Law Review, and “Into the Fire: How to Avoid Being Burned by the Same Mistakes Made Fighting Terrorism in Northern Ireland” in the Cardozo Law Review (with Michael O’Connor). She has presented her scholarship in Europe, Asia, and Africa, in addition to the United States.

The Right to Release and Bail by Pamela Okoroigwe

English Transcript

Pamela Okoroigwe is a Senior Legal and Programme Officer with Legal Defence and Assistance Project (LEDAP), where she conducts legal research, delivers pro bono services to survivors of human rights violations, and litigates capital cases in trial and appellate courts in Nigeria. She is a member of the Nigeria Death Penalty Group (NDELPEG), a coalition of over 20 civil society organizations advocating for the abolition of death penalty in Nigeria, and is a Chartered Secretary and member of the Nigerian Bar Association. She is also the coordinator of the Working Group of Eight (WG8) on violence against women in Lagos, Nigeria.

False and Involuntary Confessions by Michael O’Connor

English Transcript & French Transcript

PowerPoint Presentation

Michael O’Connor is a Professor of Law at the University of La Verne College of Law. As a practicing lawyer, he represented death-sentenced prisoners across the U.S. for almost two decades. He was a co-finalist for Trial Lawyer of the Year by the Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, for his work in the case of State of Alabama v. Walter McMillian. His comparative scholarship (with co-author Celia Rumann) on efforts to combat terrorism has been cited in official U.S. and British government documents, in white papers produced by Harvard, Yale, and Columbia Universities, and in pleadings filed before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Plea Negotiation by Chimwemwe Chithope-Mwale

English Transcript

Chimwemwe Chithope-Mwale is the Chief Legal Aid Advocate at the Malawi Legal Aid Bureau, a government office mandated to provide legal aid to indigent persons. He has represented over 100 clients facing the death penalty during his time at Legal Aid. He presently heads one of only three regional Legal Aid Bureau offices in Malawi. He is also the Treasurer of the Mzuzu Chapter of the Malawi Law Society. Chimwemwe was a Fellow of the 2017 Makwanyane Institute at the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide.

An Introduction to Mitigation by Jessica Sutton

English Transcript & PowerPoint Presentation

Jessica Sutton is a staff attorney at the Death Penalty Litigation Clinic, which she joined in 2010. During law school, Jessica co-founded a community-based legal clinic serving transgender people in Boston, including those who are incarcerated. Jessica also interned at the New York Civil Liberties Union and volunteered for the Center for Death Penalty Litigation. she founded her own criminal defense practice and provided consultation and training to capital defense teams nationwide in collaboration with the American Civil Liberties Union, Advancing Real Change, and state and federal defender agencies. Most recently, she consulted on the Alice Project with the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide.

Opening Statements by Celia Rumann

Cross-examination by celia rumann, mental health and intellectual disability by marc tassé.

PowerPoint Presentation (only available in French)

Marc J. Tassé, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at The Ohio State University. He is also the Director of the Ohio State Nisonger Center, a University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities. Tassé has more than 30 years of experience in conducting research and providing clinical services in the field of intellectual disability, autism spectrum disorder, and other related neurodevelopmental disorders. His publications include more than 155 articles in peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, and books. He has given 275+ scientific and professional presentations on topics related to ID, ASD, and other neurodevelopmental disorders. He is also actively involved in conducting evaluations and giving expert testimony in capital cases where intellectual disability is an issue.

Litigating Trauma by Denny LeBoeuf

English Transcript & French Transcript

Denny LeBoeuf is the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s John Adams Project, assisting in the defense of the capitally charged Guantánamo detainees. Previously, she served as the director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project, which works toward the end of the death penalty by supporting repeal and reform with public education, advocacy, and targeted litigation. She has been a capital defender for over 20 years, representing persons facing death at trial and post-conviction in state and federal courts. She further teaches and consults with capital defense teams nationally.

Representing foreign nationals in capital cases by Sandra Babcock

English Transcript & French Transcript

Powerpoint Presentation

Sandra Babcock is a Clinical Professor at Cornell Law School, where she is the Faculty Director and founder of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide. Over the last thirty years she has helped defend hundreds of men and women facing execution around the world. She represented Mexico before the International Court of Justice in Avena and Other Mexican Nationals. She spearheaded a ten-year project in Malawi that ultimately resulted in the release of over 250 prisoners, 150 of whom were formerly sentenced to death. She moved to Cornell Law in 2014, where she founded the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide. In 2018, together with her colleagues at CDPW, she launched the Alice Project, a global movement to end extreme sentencing of women and gender non-conforming individuals. Her clinic currently represents women facing the death penalty in the United States, Malawi, and Tanzania. She has authored numerous articles, book chapters and reports on the application of the death penalty under international law. In 2021, she received the American Bar Association’s John Paul Stevens Guiding Hand of Counsel Award, given to one capital defender every two years whose work has improved the legal representation of persons facing the death penalty and contributed to systemic reform.

Representing women facing the death penalty by Sandra Babcock

Working with the media and social media by robin maher.

English Transcript & French Transcript

Presentation on Working with the Media and Social Media

Robin M. Maher is an Adjunct Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School. Her experience includes direct representation of state and federally death-sentenced prisoners; training of judges and defense lawyers on the fundamentals of effective capital defense; legal reform efforts with legislators; systemic litigation in jurisdictions that fail to provide necessary defense services; strategic assistance and support to capital defense teams. For thirteen years she was the Director of the American Bar Association Death Penalty Representation Project and served as the ABA’s expert on legal representation in death penalty cases. She led the effort that resulted in the American Bar Association Guidelines for the Appointment and Performance of Defense Counsel in Death Penalty Cases, which is now the national standard of care for the capital defense effort in the United States.

Storytelling, Narrative, and Persuasion by John H. Blume

John H. Blume is the Director of the Cornell Death Penalty Project and Professor at Cornell Law School. He is one of the foremost death penalty practitioners in the United States, with particular expertise on the application of the death penalty to individuals with intellectual disabilities and mental illnesses. Internationally, he has been involved for the past four years in several projects related to improving the quality of capital defense in China. The first capital punishment clinic in China, launched by Professor Hongyao Wu of China University of Political Science and Law in 2010, is the result of an ongoing collaboration with Professor Blume.

Appeals by Celia Rumann

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Top 10 Pro & Con Arguments

Life without Parole

Retribution

Victims’ Families

Methods of Execution

Medical Professionals’ Participation

Federal Death Penalty

1. Legality

The United States is one of 55 countries globally with a legal death penalty, according to Amnesty International. As of Mar. 24, 2021, within the US, 27 states had a legal death penalty (though 3 of those states had a moratorium on the punishment’s use).

Proponents of the death penalty being legal argue that such a harsh penalty is needed for criminals who have committed the worst crimes, that the punishment deters crime, and that the US Supreme Court has upheld the death penalty as constitutional.

Opponents of the death penalty being legal argue that the punishment is cruel and unusual, and, thus, unconstitutional, that innocent people are put to death for crimes they did not commit, and that the penalty is disproportionately applied to people of color.

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History of the Death Penalty
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States with the Death Penalty, Death Penalty Bans, and Death Penalty Moratoriums
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October 10th marks World Day Against the Death Penalty. On this day, people come together to raise awareness and advocate for the abolition of this cruel and inhumane practice. The death penalty has been a controversial topic for decades, with many questioning its effectiveness as a deterrent for crime. Maybe you want to hold a debate about this topic, or just raise awareness. Both are valid reasons to use our editable template. Its design is relatively simple, with an assortment of resources and a good number of slides to be as extensive as you wish.

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Death Penalty

Dec 17, 2012

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Death Penalty. Katie Schofield John Grib Doug MacDonald . Introduction. “Sentence of death upon a person by the state as a punishment for an offence” Crimes punishable by death are called capital crimes or offences Currently 58 countries practice the death penalty. History.

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Presentation Transcript

Death Penalty Katie Schofield John Grib Doug MacDonald

Introduction • “Sentence of death upon a person by the state as a punishment for an offence” • Crimes punishable by death are called capital crimes or offences • Currently 58 countries practice the death penalty

History • Used in colonial America for murders and other crimes • Karla Faye Tucker: first woman to be executed in Texas • Furman vs. Georgia- 1972 ruled all capital punishment unconstitutional. Determined to be “cruel and unusual” • 1976- death penalty was reinstated as constitutional • By 2009 1,167 prisoners had been executed in the U.S.

Pros • Helps deter crime • Is an appropriate punishment- serves justice • Not using death penalty risks criminals killing again • Helps control over population in prisons

Cons • Religions believe all killing is wrong • Bad way to teach that killing is wrong • Biased (those sentenced to death are mostly men, minorities, and people who can’t afford a good defense team • Expensive ($2-3.5 million to execute one person) • Some argue it isn’t a significant deterrent • Possibility of executing innocent people

Interest Groups • Amnesty International- working to abolish the death penalty • They believe it is a denial of human rights • Campaigns to abolish the death penalty • Focus on individual cases, supporting repeal efforts • Justice for All (prodeathpenalty.com) - pro death penalty • Exert social and legislative influence • An organization to reform the criminal justice system through private and corporate membership

Evidence/ Statistics • Pro

Evidence/ Statistics • Con • Costs • The California death penalty system costs taxpayers $114 million per year beyond the costs of keeping convicts locked up for life. Taxpayers have paid more than $250 million for each of the state’s executions. (L.A. Times, March 6, 2005) • In Kansas, the costs of capital cases are 70% more expensive than comparable non-capital cases, including the costs of incarceration. (Kansas Performance Audit Report, December 2003). • In Maryland, an average death penalty case resulting in a death sentence costs approximately $3 million. The eventual costs to Maryland taxpayers for cases pursued 1978-1999 will be $186 million. Five executions have resulted. (Urban Institute 2008).

Evidence/ Statistics

Evidence/ Statistics • • A comprehensive study of the death penalty in North Carolina found that the odds of receiving a death sentence rose by 3.5 times among those defendants whose victims were white. (Prof. Jack Boger and Dr. Isaac Unah, University of North Carolina, 2001). • • A study in California found that those who killed whites were over 3 times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who killed blacks and over 4 times more likely than those who killed Latinos. (Pierce & Radelet, Santa Clara Law Review 2005).

Recent Developments • Death sentences are at their lowest rates since 1976 • Illinois signed an abolition bill of the death penalty in 2011 • It looks like Connecticut will be the next state to abolish the death penalty • Current Governor Dannel Malloy said he would sign a death penalty bill if passed by the House and Senate. • North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue vetoed a bill that would essentiall repeal a former bill that gave death row inmates a new way to argue that their skin color influenced their sentences

Bibliography • White, Deborah. "Pros & Cons of the Death Penalty and Capital Punishment." Liberal & Progressive Politics & Perspectives. Web. 15 Dec. 2011. <http://usliberals.about.com/od/deathpenalty/i/DeathPenalty.htm>. • "Death Penalty." Issues & Controversies On File: n. pag. Issues & Controversies. Facts On File News Services, 1 May 1998. Web. 15 Dec. 2011. <http://www.2facts.com/article/i0300920>. • "Abolish the Death Penalty | Amnesty International USA." Amnesty International USA | Protect Human Rights. Web. 15 Dec. 2011. <http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/campaigns/abolish-the-death-penalty?id=1011005>. • Justice For All - A Criminal Justice Reform Organization. Web. 15 Dec. 2011. <http://www.jfa.net/index.html>.

Bibliography • Baynes, Terry. "Study Finds Death Penalty Use in Decline| Reuters." Business & Financial News, Breaking US & International News | Reuters.com. 15 Dec. 2011. Web. 16 Dec. 2011. <http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/15/us-study-finds-death-penalty-idUSTRE7BE29M20111215>. • "Executing Prisoners From a Financial Viewpoint « Stew!" Stew! Web. 16 Dec. 2011. <http://bradnehring.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/executing-prisoners-from-a-financial-viewpoint/>. • "What We Sacrifice on Death Row - SFGate." Featured Articles From The SFGate. 30 June 2008. Web. 16 Dec. 2011. <http://articles.sfgate.com/2008-06-30/opinion/17164745_1_death-penalty-penalty-system-executions>.

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Jury recommends death penalty for ex-prison guard trainee who murdered 5 women inside florida bank.

Terry Spencer

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FILE - A Highlands County Sheriff's SWAT vehicle is stationed out in front of a SunTrust Bank branch, Wednesday, Jan. 23, 2019, in Sebring, Fla., where authorities say five people were shot and killed. Assistant State Attorney Bonde Johnson told jurors during closing arguments Wednesday, June 26, 2024, that Xaver, 27, committed the murders at Sebring's SunTrust bank in Florida in 2019, to satisfy his yearslong desire to experience killing, forcing the women to lie down before executing them. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara, File)

A jury recommended Wednesday that a former prison guard trainee be sentenced to death for his execution-style murders of five women inside a Florida bank five years ago.

The Highlands County jury voted 9-3 to recommend that Zephen Xaver receive the death penalty for the Jan. 23, 2019, massacre at the SunTrust Bank in Sebring, a community about 85 miles (135 kilometers) southeast of Tampa.

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Terry Spencer

Associated Press

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Race, Human Rights, and the U.S. Death Penalty

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From enslavement to lynching, race massacres, the genocide against indigenous peoples, Jim Crow segregation, and immigrant exclusion policies, the United States has a long history of human rights abuses arising out of racial violence and discrimination.

Following the ratification of the post-Civil War amendments to the U.S. Constitution that ended chattel slavery and guaranteed equal protection of the law to all Americans, and the landmark Reconstruction Era Civil Rights Act, governmental acts of racial discrimination became unconstitutional and unlawful in this country. While enshrined as the law of the land, those rights are often violated and those violations are often not redressed by the courts. Whether deemed a violation of domestic law or not, those governmental acts of racial discrimination — and toleration of racial discrimination by non-enforcement of prohibitions against it — may violate international human rights law.

International Context on Race and Human Rights

The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination was adopted in 1965 and ratified, with reservations , by the United States in 1994. Article 2 sweepingly “condemn[s] racial discrimination” and commits parties to the treaty to “undertake to pursue by all appropriate means and without delay a policy of eliminating racial discrimination in all its forms.” Article 2, Section 1(a) makes clear that the obligations of the treaty extend beyond federal governments, committing countries “to engage in no act or practice of racial discrimination … and to ensure that all public authorities and public institutions, national and local, shall act in conformity with this obligation.”

Article 6 of the Convention requires countries to “assure to everyone within their jurisdiction effective protection and remedies, through the competent national tribunals and other State institutions, against any acts of racial discrimination.” The failure of Congress to provide effective remedies and the refusal of federal courts to enforce them are themselves violations of international human rights norms, separate and apart from the initial violation by state or local government actors.

Although the United States signed ICERD in 1966, it was not ratified by the Senate until October 1994. The Senate declared the treaty to be “not self-executing,” meaning that its provisions would be unenforceable in U.S. courts unless Congress separately enacted legislation making it part of U.S. domestic law. Congress has not done so, nor has it enacted legislation that would permit individuals who believed their human rights under ICERD had been violated to bring suit in U.S. courts. It also refused to submit disputes under ICERD to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice without “the specific consent of the United States … in each case.”

According to the American Bar Association Section on Civil Rights and Social Justice, these actions “nullify the treaty’s effect” and demonstrate a “hollow” and “watered-down commitment … toward ICERD’s goal of eliminating global racial discrimination.”

In recent years, international human rights bodies have criticized the United States for endemic racial discrimination throughout its criminal legal system. Following the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, and during the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, the United Nations Human Rights Council called for an urgent debate in June 2020 . In that session, the council discussed systemic racism and violations of international human rights law committed by law enforcement officials against Africans and people of African descent around the world, and proposed a “transformative agenda” to “end impunity for human rights violations by law enforcement officials and … ensure that the voices of people of African descent and those who stand up against racism are heard and that their concerns are acted upon.” The session concluded with a resolution calling upon the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights to conduct a thorough report on the matter.

In 2021, the “groundbreaking” racial justice report was released and provided 20 actionable recommendations. Unsatisfied with the progress since, the Office of the High Commissioner released a subsequent report in 2022 identifying “ piecemeal progress in combating systemic racism .” The racial justice report specifically noted “the disproportionate impact of the death penalty, punitive drug policies, arrests, overrepresentation in prisons and other aspects of the criminal justice system on people of African descent in different countries” and quoted Amnesty International’s 2021 Global Report on Death Sentences and Executions that charged that “many cases of those who faced the death penalty [in the United States] in 2021 were also affected by concerns of racial discrimination and bias.”

The 2020 United Nations Universal Periodic Review of the United States’ human rights record includes generalized criticism from several UN bodies regarding the discriminatory nature of the U.S. capital punishment system. The Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, which had previously expressed concern about the existence of capital punishment in 2016, noted that those of African descent were disproportionally affected, citing the fact that they represented over 40% of the U.S. death row population. The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention noted that “African Americans were more likely to be sentenced to longer terms of imprisonment” and expressed concern “about the existence of racial disparities at all stages of the criminal justice system.”

Evidence of Race Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty

Everywhere in the world in which the death penalty exists, it is applied disproportionately against racially, religiously, ethnically, and politically disfavored groups. The United States is no exception to that worldwide rule.

The United States death penalty is often referred to as a descendent of the American historical practices of enslavement, lynching, and Jim Crow segregation. Studies have found that states with a greater history of lynchings also tend to have more modern death sentences, and that the link is even stronger between lynchings and death sentences imposed upon Black defendants. [1] A 2022 study documented the “deep historical and contemporary connection [between the death penalty and] white racial hostility toward blacks.” [2] It found that the same “racial resentment of blacks [that] drives support for the death penalty at the individual level” operates at the state level and that “states with higher aggregate levels of racial resentment impose more death sentences,” particularly against African Americans. From slavery to lynching to segregation to the death penalty and mass incarceration, the researchers wrote, “[r]acial attitudes that historically led to discrimination and racial subjugation reproduce themselves within the white population through the institutions and political cultures of a given area.”

Studies show that racial discrimination operates and compounds itself at each stage of a potentially capital case, from policing practices, to charging decisions, to plea negotiations, and on through the process of trial, sentencing, appeal, and execution. [3] A review of a dataset of 2,328 Georgia first-degree murder convictions that produced 1,317 death eligible cases found that two sets of factors operated in combination to determine who would be executed: “victim race and gender, and a set of case-specific features that are often correlated with race.” [4] Indeed, Georgia data showed that “racial disparities persist and … are magnified during the appellate and clemency processes,” with the net result that “the overall execution rate is a staggering seventeen times greater for defendants convicted of killing a white victim.” [5]

Other landmark studies have documented similar phenomena: after rating cases based upon the perceived severity of a murder, African Americans were more likely to be sentenced to death than white defendants irrespective of the race of the victim and the severity of the murder, and a death sentence was more likely to be imposed in a case involving one or more white victims, irrespective of the race of the defendant and the severity of the murder. The combination of race of victim and race of defendant most likely to produce a death verdict at all levels of severity was a Black defendant and a white victim.

Graph from Baldus, et al., Racial Discrimination and the Death Penalty in the Post-Furman Era: An Empirical and Legal Overview with Recent Findings from Philadelphia, Cornell Law Review ( 1998 ).

A study of the death penalty in Philadelphia, [6] which in 2001 had 113 African Americans on death row — 25 more than any other county in the U.S. [7] — found that the odds that a capital trial would result in a death sentence were 3.1 times greater if the defendant was Black; and those odds became 9.3 times greater if the case advanced to a capital penalty phase; and 29.0 times greater if a jury found both aggravating and mitigating circumstances to be present and had to make the discretionary choice between life or death.

To explore the impact of racial bias — overt or implicit — on capital sentencing, other researchers examined whether the defendant’s appearance affected the likelihood of a death sentence. [8] They rated African American capital defendants based upon the degree to which they had prototypically African facial features (i.e., darker skin, broader nose, and thicker lips) and examined sentencing outcomes based upon the race of the victim. They found that a Black defendant’s appearance had no statistically significant difference in sentencing outcomes if the victim also was Black. But in cases in which the victim was white, a Black defendant with archetypical African features was twice as likely to be sentenced to death as a Black defendant with lighter skin, a narrower nose, and thinner lips.

Image from the Philadelphia “ Looking Deathworthy” study, Eberhardt, et al., Looking Deathworthy: Perceived Stereotypicality of Black Defendants Predicts Capital-Sentencing Outcomes, Psychological Science ( 2006 ).

The racist underpinnings of the U.S. death penalty — and its emergence as a successor to extrajudicial lynchings — can be seen most clearly in the historical application of the death penalty for allegations of rape . Between 1930 and 1972, 455 people in the United States were executed for rape. 405 (89.1%) of those executed were Black. 443 of the executions for rape (97.3%) occurred in the states of the former Confederacy. No white man has ever been executed in the U.S. for the rape of a Black woman or child in which the victim was not killed. For most of the 20th century, Virginia permitted the death penalty for rape, attempted rape, and armed robbery that did not result in death. 73 Black men and boys were executed on charges they had committed non-lethal acts. No white person was executed for an offense that did not result in death.

In the “modern era” — since states began re-enacting death penalty laws after the Supreme Court struck down existing death penalty statutes in 1972 — executions have been limited to cases in which a victim was killed. That has eliminated the huge racial bias present in death penalty cases for non-lethal offenses. However, significant race-of defendant and race-of victim bias remains. Executions disproportionately involve white victims, suggesting an inappropriate race-based conception of what constitutes the “worst of the worst” killings. And among the most vulnerable of defendants — juveniles, late adolescents, the intellectually disabled, and those who are innocent and have been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death — significant bias permeates the death penalty system.

More than two thirds (30 of 44) of the known intellectually disabled prisoners who were executed before the Supreme Court banned the practice in Atkins v. Virginia in 2002 were people of color. More than 60% (27 of 44) were Black. Over the next twenty years, U.S. states executed at least 29 more prisoners who most likely were intellectually disabled. More than three-quarters (22, 75.9%) were people of color and 62.1% (18 of 29) were Black. As of December 2022, at least 142 condemned prisoners had their death sentences overturned under Atkins : More than 4 in 5 (118, 83.1%) were people of color and more than two-thirds (96, 67.6%) were Black.

Similarly, nearly two-thirds (65.2%) of the 235 death sentences imposed on juvenile offenders (under age 18) in the United States in the modern era before the Supreme Court struck down that practice in Roper v. Simmons in 2005 were people of color. [9] More than half (52.0%) were Black. 64.7% of the 1,319 death sentences imposed on late adolescent offenders (between ages 18 and 21) in the U.S. in the modern era have been directed at people of color, with more than half imposed on Black adolescents (51.2%). [10] Noting that “Black youth are punished more harshly than Whites” and that “it is clear death as a penalty is not applied equally and fairly among members of the late adolescent class,” the American Psychological Association in August 2022 adopted a resolution calling for an end to the death penalty for individuals aged 18-20.

The National Registry of Exonerations has documented that Black defendants charged with murder are much more vulnerable to wrongful convictions than are their white counterparts. In its 2022 report, Race and Wrongful Convictions in the United States , the Registry found that Black people are about 7½ times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder in the U.S. than are whites, and about 80% more likely to be innocent than others convicted of murder. The already disproportionate risk of wrongful conviction, the Registry found, was even worse if the murder victim in a case was white.

Not surprisingly, death-row exonerations highlight the enhanced risk of wrongful conviction that innocent defendants of color face in their capital trials. Nearly two-thirds of wrongfully convicted death-row prisoners who have subsequently been exonerated are individuals of color and more than half are Black. As of March 2023, DPIC had documented 191 death-row exonerations since 1973: one exoneration for every 8.2 executions in the United States in the past half century. DPIC’s exoneration data shows that exonerees of color, and particularly those who are Black, are more likely to be victims of official misconduct and false accusation, more likely to be wrongfully convicted and condemned, and more likely to spend longer periods facing execution or under the continuing shadow of their wrongful conviction than white death-row exonerees.

Reframing the Death Penalty as a Human Rights Issue Rather than a Legitimate Tool of Public Safety

In most of the democratic nations of the world, the death penalty is viewed as a human rights issue. And when the United States looks outward at the death penalty policies and practices of autocratic regimes like Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, North Korea, and Belarus, it, too, tends to frame the issue in terms of human rights. But Americans rarely turn the human rights lens inward towards this nation’s death penalty practices. Instead, internally, the death penalty tends to be discussed as a legitimate criminal legal policy option in promoting and protecting public safety.

However, that is beginning to change as historians, academics, and policy advocates increasingly address the historical use of enslavement and punishment as instruments of social control in the United States and the continuing role the death penalty plays in legitimizing other policies of mass incarceration.

In a 2015 interview with The Marshall Project , Equal Justice Initiative founder and executive director Bryan Stevenson observed that the United States has “never committed itself to a conversation about the legacy of slavery. … Very few people in this country have any awareness of just how expansive and how debilitating and destructive America’s history of slavery is.”

“The whole narrative of white supremacy was created during the era of slavery. It was a necessary theory to make white Christian people feel comfortable with their ownership of other human beings,” Stevenson said. “And we created a narrative of racial difference in this country to sustain slavery, and even people who didn’t own slaves bought into that narrative, including people in the North. … We created a narrative of racial difference to maintain slavery. And our 13th amendment never dealt with that narrative. It didn’t talk about white supremacy. The Emancipation Proclamation doesn’t discuss the ideology of white supremacy or the narrative of racial difference. So I don’t believe slavery ended in 1865, I believe it just evolved. It turned into decades of racial hierarchy that was violently enforced — from the end of reconstruction until WWII — through acts of racial terror.”

During the 2018 dedication of EJI’s lynching memorial , the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Stevenson called capital punishment “the stepchild of lynching. … It was disproportionately used against people of color; it still continues to be shaped primarily by race,” he said.

Stevenson argues that “we’ve used the death penalty to sustain racial hierarchy by making it primarily a tool to reinforce the victimization of white people. The greatest racial disparity of the death penalty is the way in which the death penalty is largely reserved for cases where the victims are white. … And that’s true throughout this country. We’ve used it particularly aggressively when minority defendants are accused of killing white people. And history is replete with defendants being described with the n-word, cases just saturated with racial bigotry, and the courts have largely tolerated that.” He says that the occasional pursuit of the death penalty for hate crimes targeting Black victims does not legitimize the death penalty. “We can’t be distracted by thinking that if they execute one person who committed mass violence that’s some sign of progress. That’s a sign of tactical misdirection to preserve a system that is inherently corrupted by a narrative of racial difference.”

In a 2023 Discussions With DPIC podcast interview, Georgetown University Racial Justice Institute Executive Director Diann Rust-Tierney observed that “for a long time, the death penalty has been misclassified … as if it was a normal public safety tool, notwithstanding the fact that there is no relationship between safety and the death penalty, that we don’t see reduction in the crime or murder in places that use the death penalty.” Rust-Tierney describes the suggestion that the death penalty is a tool of public safety as “fiction.” Rather, she says, “the death penalty really [is] part of something much more terrible. It is part of the racial caste system in the United States.”

“[F]rom its very beginning in history, from the very first time that Africans were brought to the United States to work, it was part of a legal and social system designed to keep various races in their place and to reinforce the institution of slavery,” Rust-Tierney says. “And the most important thing that the death penalty does, and did then, is to tell us the value of different lives. In other words, it places a different value on the life of a victim, depending upon their race, and it places a different value on the life of the defendant based on their race. That’s something we’ve seen historically, and so it was important to understand that the death penalty is not a tool of public safety, but it is in fact, a tool of racial and social oppression.”

Rust-Tierney frames the discussion of capital punishment in the U.S. and worldwide as part of “a global struggle for human rights, a global struggle for democracy.” She notes that the most aggressive death penalty states in the U.S. are engaging in a broad range of anti-democratic practices, making their execution practices state secrets, attempting to bar African Americans from jury service through regulations and rules that limit who can serve on a jury or through the discriminatory use of jury strikes, attempting to overturn the results of local elections in which reform prosecutors have said that they don’t intend to seek the death penalty or are going to seek the death penalty more sparingly, and trying to oppress a significant segment of their population through voter suppression. “The reality,” she says, “is that the death penalty is a tool of oppression. Autocrats and anti-democratic people and dictators use death as punishment, and they wield it where they will, and how they will …. [T]he death penalty is a tool of power.”

Rust-Tierney says “it’s time to stand on the side of either democracy and self determination and human rights on this side or on the side of autocracy and oppression and dictators. And in that stark contrast, you have to oppose the death penalty.”

DPIC Webinars: Webinar on Race and the U.S. Death Penalty ;

German Embassy Panel on Human Rights & the U.S. Death Penalty, Diann Rust Tierney speaks at 54min

DPIC Report: Enduring Injustice

DPIC Webpage: Race Page

DPIC Podcast: Georgetown Racial Justice Institute Director Diann Rust-Tierney on Reconceptualizing the U.S. Death Penalty as a Violation of Fundamental Human Rights

Human Rights Council holds an urgent debate on current racially inspired human rights violations, systemic racism, police brutality and violence against peaceful protests

2022 Report: A/HRC/51/53: Promotion and protection of the human rights and fundamental freedoms of Africans and of people of African descent against excessive use of force and other human rights violations by law enforcement officers through transformative change for

Agenda towards transformative change for racial justice and equality

2021 Report: A/HRC/47/53: Promotion and protection of the human rights and fundamental freedoms of Africans and of people of African descent against excessive use of force and other human rights violations by law enforcement officers

International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination

IACHR Precautionary Measure on Julius Jones

2020 Universal Period Review of United States Human Rights Record

Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide: Discrimination Page

Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide: Arbitrariness Page

Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide: Due Process Page

[1] David Jacobs, Jason T. Carmichael, and Stephanie L. Kent, Vigilantism, Current Racial Threat, and Death Sentences , American Sociological Review 656–77, Vol. 70 (Aug. 2005).

[2] Frank R. Baumgartner, Christian Caron, and Scott Duxbury, Racial Resentment and the Death Penalty , The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics 1–19 (2022).

[3] Jeffrey Fagan, Garth Davies, and Raymond Paternoster, Getting to Death: Race and the Paths of Capital Cases After Furman , 107 Cornell Law Review 1565-1620 (2022); Scott Phillips and Justin F. Marceau, Whom the State Kills , 55 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 585-656, Issue 2 (Summer 2020).

[4] Fagan et al. , at 1565.

[5] Phillips and Marceau, at 603.

[6] David C. Baldus, George Woodworth, David Zuckerman, and Neil Alan Weiner, Racial Discrimination and the Death Penalty in the Post-Furman Era: An Empirical and Legal Overview with Recent Findings from Philadelphia , 83 Cornell Law Review 1638-1770 (1998).

[7] Robert Dunham, Racial composition of death row in the seventy most populous counties in states with the death penalty , July 16, 2001, document on file with the Death Penalty Information Center.

[8] Jennifer L. Eberhardt, P G. Davies, Valerie J. Purdie-Vaughns, and Sheri Lynn Johnson, Looking Deathworthy: Perceived Stereotypicality of Black Defendants Predicts Capital-Sentencing Outcomes , Psychological Science 383-86, Vol. 17, No. 5 (2006).

[9] For whom race is known. 235 people were sentenced to death for crimes committed before they turned age 18. 115 were Black; 77 were white; 26 were Hispanic; 3 were of other races; and race data was missing for 14.

[10] Again, for whom race is known. 1,319 death sentences were imposed on late adolescent offenders. 640 were Black; 442 were white; 139 were Hispanic; 30 were of other races; and race data was missing for 68 cases.

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Oklahoma Prepares to Kill Another Man Who Says He’s Innocent

Richard Rojem’s death sentence was twice overturned by appellate courts, but his conviction itself has never been fully revisited.

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Richard Rojem Jr. had 20 minutes to address the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board. Wearing a maroon prison uniform, he raised his cuffed right hand and swore to tell the truth, then gave his pitch for why his life should be spared. It would take less than 90 seconds.

“This hearing didn’t have to take place,” he began. Prosecutors had offered a plea deal right up until the day of his 1985 trial; if he’d admitted to abducting, raping, and murdering his young stepdaughter, Layla Cummings, Rojem could have avoided a death sentence. But he refused: “An innocent man doesn’t ever plead guilty to a crime he hasn’t committed.”

Rojem spoke via video link from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. It was June 17, and his execution was 10 days away. At 66, he’d been on death row for virtually his whole adult life. He’d survived for so long in part because appellate courts had deemed his original trial to be unfair, upholding his conviction but twice overturning his death sentence. Meanwhile, fingernail scrapings taken from Cummings revealed an unknown male DNA profile and nothing from Rojem. This was potentially powerful exculpatory evidence. But a third jury, unaware of the DNA testing, resentenced him to die.

Cummings was only 7 years old when she vanished from her mother’s small apartment overnight in the small town of Elk City, located on the border of Western Oklahoma. After a 10-hour search, her body was discovered in a wheat field in an adjacent county on July 7, 1984. Her underwear was stuffed in her mouth, and she had been stabbed to death. Rojem, who had recently divorced Cummings’s mother, quickly became the prime suspect. He had previously been accused of molesting the child, which he denied. Prosecutors said he’d brutally assaulted and killed Cummings out of revenge.

Forty years later, Rojem had no illusions of mercy. He’d seen 124 people escorted to the death chamber. Some had received clemency recommendations only to be rebuffed by the governor, who gets the final say. Since resuming executions in 2021, Gov. Kevin Stitt has overseen the killing of 12 people. He has rejected clemency recommendations from the board three times. Amid overwhelming public pressure, he commuted a single death sentence to life in prison: that of Julius Jones, whose case became a cause célèbre .

Unlike Jones, Rojem is virtually unknown outside Oklahoma. He believes it is due to the nature of the crime. “Nobody wants to talk about it, nobody wants to get involved, nobody wants to seriously help a guy like me because nobody wants to risk lending their credibility to helping a guy with a case like this and be wrong,” Rojem wrote in a message to anti-death penalty activists last year. Although a handful of supporters submitted letters to the board, no one spoke on his behalf at the hearing apart from Rojem’s longtime attorneys.

The hearing lasted two hours. Rojem’s attorneys argued that the case against him had been thin from the start. “I think it would be a travesty to execute him based on the evidence presented in this case,” veteran death penalty attorney Jack Fisher told the board. The state, led by Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, rejected that characterization of the evidence while stressing one of the most damning strikes against Rojem. “While our focus here today is on Layla Cummings,” Drummond said, “past is prologue. In 1978, Mr. Rojem raped two girls in Michigan. The evidence was overwhelming. He even pled guilty to one of the charges. But he’s never accepted responsibility. He’s never said he’s sorry.”

Rojem did not claim to be innocent of these crimes. “I wasn’t a good human being for the first part of my life,” he told the board. “And I don’t deny that. But I went to prison. I learned my lesson. And I left all that behind. … My understanding is that this hearing is to decide my fate on only the case before us and nothing else. I did not kidnap Layla. I did not rape Layla. And I did not murder Layla.”

It took just a few minutes for the board to make its decision. The votes were unanimous: five votes to deny clemency. The June 27 execution would move forward.

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond is pictured Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2023, during an interview in Oklahoma City. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)

An Insufficient Defense

If Rojem dies by lethal injection on Thursday, Drummond will almost certainly be in the front row. The attorney general has made it a point to attend each execution carried out on his watch, even as he has fought to slow down the state’s once-frenzied killing schedule , citing the burden on prison staff. Some of his maneuvering has undoubtedly been political: Drummond is widely understood to be planning a gubernatorial run in 2026, and his willingness to disrupt the state’s death penalty system has already cost him. He has especially enraged Oklahoma’s elected district attorneys by going out of his way to save the life of Richard Glossip , most recently filing a brief in his favor before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Drummond’s concern over Glossip’s innocence claim has not extended to others on death row. The same has often been true of people who have been outspoken about the state’s system as a whole. State Rep. Kevin McDugle has decried Oklahoma’s “sad history of pushing cases through the full judicial process and declaring them final and over, only to have many convicted men later exonerated.” Yet he is also firm that sex crimes against children keep him from rejecting the death penalty altogether. “If we have somebody who rapes a baby and slices the baby’s throat and outs him in a shallow grave,” he said at a press conference in 2019, “that person should be put to death immediately.”

The revulsion and outrage surrounding crimes against children make it easier to ignore red flags in a case like Rojem’s. Although prosecutors point out that his conviction has repeatedly been upheld in state and federal court, that is hardly the whole story. In Oklahoma as in the rest of the country, daunting procedural barriers stand in the way of revisiting the evidence in a given death penalty case. In Rojem’s case, the available record reveals significant problems that were either ignored or waved away by appellate courts and that were not brought up at the clemency hearing. Although Rojem’s resentencing trials provided a chance to present mitigating evidence that his original jury did not hear, courts refused to grant an evidentiary hearing to consider evidence that may have challenged the state’s theory of the crime but which his trial attorneys never investigated.

Some of the problems in Rojem’s case reflect the era in which he was tried. At the time of his conviction, Oklahoma’s death penalty had only recently been reinstated following a landmark Supreme Court ruling that forced states to rewrite their death penalty statutes. Although Oklahoma lawmakers were quick to pass a new death penalty law, they did not provide an infrastructure for the wave of indigent defendants who would soon go on trial for their life.

Rojem’s court-appointed defense attorneys were a husband-wife team who had never handled a felony case, let alone a death penalty trial. Like other private lawyers appointed to represent indigent defendants during the 1980s, their pay had been set by the state legislature, which allotted a maximum of “$200.00 for services rendered before the preliminary hearing, $500.00 for services rendered during the preliminary hearing,” and “$2,500.00 for services rendered from the time the defendant is bound over until final disposition in the trial court.” Attorneys who wished to hire an investigator or experts to examine the evidence in the case had to seek permission from the trial court, which routinely denied such requests. In Rojem’s case, not only did the court refuse to provide such funds, post-conviction requests to access the state’s case file were also denied.

The need for Rojem’s defense to investigate the case was especially crucial given law enforcement’s immediate focus on Rojem. Although the state today insists that all leads pointed directly to him, others close to the case felt strongly that this was not true. Among them was Cummings’s own father, who “apparently did not believe that his daughter was murdered by [Rojem],” as a federal court wrote in 1999. Donald Cummings suspected that it was a man on his ex-wife’s side of the family who was the true perpetrator and sought to share his suspicions with law enforcement. “In fact, Mr. Cummings apparently conducted some sort of investigation on his own into the case,” the court found. Just over a year after his daughter’s murder, Donald Cummings took his own life.

Easy Scapegoat

The story of how Rojem became a suspect is told in a 1985 article in the Detroit Free Press, which framed the case as the product of Michigan’s overly lax parole system. Violent people left prison too early, free to wreak havoc across the country. “Every state turns its problems loose on someone else,” one Oklahoma rancher told the paper. “That’s just what old Fidel did with his problems — put ‘em on boats to Florida.”

In fact, Rojem had arrived in Oklahoma to be with Cummings’s mother, whom he’d met inside a Michigan prison, where she was visiting her brother. “She was taken with Rojem, a young prisoner who seemed determined to turn his life around,” according to the paper. They got married shortly after, while Rojem was still incarcerated. He was released in 1982 and went to work in the oil fields in the western part of the state.

But things quickly went downhill. Rojem lost his job, drank heavily, and in 1983 was arrested while drunk driving. According to Cummings’s mother, Rojem was in jail following the arrest when her daughter accused him of abusing her. Nevertheless, she took Rojem back and the couple stayed together until splitting up in May 1984. After that, Rojem continued to see his ex-wife and her kids. Just a few days before Cummings disappeared, Rojem took her and her brother out for ice cream.

After Cummings was found, investigators searched Rojem’s home and took hair samples. Tire tracks at the scene were reportedly matched to his car. But there was no direct physical evidence linking him to the crime. Washita County District Attorney Steve Suttle, who prosecuted the case, conceded to the Detroit Free Press that the evidence was “circumstantial to be sure,” but promised there was much more to come. At trial he introduced condom wrappers found near the child’s body, linking them to a used condom found in Rojem’s home.

Rojem’s roommate swore to the Detroit Free Press that he was incapable of such a grisly crime. “They’re trying to build a case that a warped, twisted, pervert rapist from Michigan killed this little girl in a field. … I don’t believe it, not for a minute. Those kids loved Rick Rojem and Rick Rojem loved those kids.” Yet Cummings’s brother, who was 9 years old when his sister was killed, became a key witness for the prosecution. Although he’d told investigators that he did not see the man who took his little sister, on the stand he testified that he had seen Rojem — a fact that surprised prosecutors and defense attorneys alike.

Ultimately, the denial of funding to investigate Rojem’s case was devastating to his defense. There was no expert witness who could challenge the state’s key forensic evidence: a mangled plastic cup that had been found in the parking lot of the Cummings’ apartment, which allegedly came from a bar where Rojem had been spotted the night of the murder. A partial fingerprint was found on the inside of the cup and, despite its poor quality, matched to Rojem. “What better evidence in the world is there than a fingerprint?” the prosecutor asked the jury. Nor was there anyone to testify about numerous hairs that had been found on Cummings’s body, which were not matched to Rojem, and which Suttle himself conceded were “strange.” The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals would later conclude that the hairs had been deliberately planted “in an apparent attempt to lead investigators” to the wrong suspect.

In his own interview with the Detroit Free Press, Rojem’s lead attorney said his client was an easy scapegoat. “He has a poor record in Michigan and that was enough.”

Photos of Layla Cummings was displayed as Oklahoma Attorney Gentner Drummond urged the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole board to reject clemency for Richard Rojem on June 17, 2024.

Failure to Mitigate

Rojem had been on death row for almost 15 years when a federal district court overturned his death sentence. Although the court upheld his conviction, it found that Rojem’s constitutional rights had been violated when the trial judge failed to properly instruct the jury on the need to consider mitigating evidence before sentencing him to death. Rojem’s jury, it found, seemed to be under the impression that they only needed to find at least one aggravating factor and that weighing mitigating factors was optional.

A resentencing trial took place in 2003. By then, Rojem’s appellate attorneys had gotten a chance to test evidence from the case for DNA. They made a significant discovery. Scrapings from underneath Cummings’s fingernails had produced an unknown male profile that excluded their client. At the resentencing trial, Rojem’s lawyers were granted permission to call as a witness the state DNA analyst who did the testing. Despite the powerful evidence, the jury decided that Rojem should die.

But that outcome, too, was reversed on appeal when the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals found that the presiding judge had failed to dismiss prospective jurors who were unfairly biased against Rojem. Defense attorneys had been forced to use their limited peremptory challenges to remove jurors with inappropriate connections to the case, such as a man who had discussed the case with the local sheriff, whom he knew from church. The result was a jury that was skewed against Rojem, the court concluded, sending the case back for resentencing.

The third and last sentencing trial took place in 2007. Rojem’s lawyers presented 15 witnesses, many of whom spoke about Rojem’s positive traits. Among them were Rojem’s death row case manager, who highlighted his good behavior behind bars; a Buddhist minister who described Rojem’s religious conversion and deep faith; and a former Oklahoma state representative who favorably described how Rojem had pushed to win the right for the condemned to donate their organs after being executed.

Unlike the previous resentencing trial, Rojem’s attorneys were barred from introducing the DNA evidence, a major blow. But perhaps just as detrimental was the failure to present evidence of serious childhood trauma that might have led Rojem’s jury to spare his life, regardless of their belief in his guilt. An investigation into Rojem’s early life had revealed that he had been repeatedly molested and raped by a stepbrother beginning when he was 7 years old; the abuse lasted until he was 9. Rojem’s attorneys had planned to present this evidence through an expert who had prepared a PowerPoint presentation. The slides included bullet points describing the abuse. But the presiding judge refused to allow the presentation — and Rojem’s attorneys did not ask the expert any questions to elicit such testimony. Instead, the expert alluded to the abuse briefly during his time on the stand, referring to “other things that happened” to Rojem that had shaped who he’d become as an adult. He was sentenced to death for a third time.

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Even if such evidence had not been persuasive to a jury, there is reason to believe that Rojem’s history of childhood trauma might have swayed at least one member of the Pardon and Parole Board to cast a vote to spare his life. The board had previously recommended clemency for a man based in part on the horrific abuse he’d endured as a child. But there was no mention of this history during last week’s hearing. Rojem’s life before and after his conviction was not described at all.

Instead, the lawyers sought to persuade the board that the forensic evidence in Rojem’s case, which was weak to begin with, was even weaker 40 years later. Fingerprint evidence, like many other forensic practices, has been shown to have little basis in science, attorney Paul McCausland explained: “The infallibility of fingerprint evidence is a myth.” While this is certainly true and highly relevant to Rojem’s case, challenging the validity of longstanding forensic practices has been an uphill battle within the legal system for decades. He was unlikely to persuade the board within a half-hour. And he was no match for the victim’s side, powerfully represented by Cummings’s aunt. “The Cummings family has been forced to endure Mr. Rojem’s depravity for 40 years,” she said. “Layla and Don have both gone on and I have grown old. Nevertheless, it is my hope that through me you will see their suffering.”

Rojem’s attorneys did not respond to interview requests from The Intercept. Many of those who were involved in the original trial are now deceased, including his defense lawyers. Suttle, the original prosecutor, died earlier this year. In a phone message responding to a request for an interview, his widow said it was “a damn shame because he would have been gratified to see the completion of his case.”

Three days after the clemency hearing, Rojem was moved to death watch, the prison cell where he will stay until he is escorted to the execution chamber. In a message to an advocate, he said he was grateful to have had a chance to say his goodbyes. “I’ll neither confirm/deny the presence of mistiness in the ocular region,” he wrote, adding a smiley face.

Rojem’s advocates don’t claim to know the truth of his guilt or innocence. But they insist that his life has value regardless. Most of them call him Daiji, his Buddhist name, and describe him as more concerned with their well-being than his own. In my own brief correspondence with Rojem last year, he seemed at peace with his circumstances, joking wryly about his lack of confidence that state officials would be able to carry out so many executions without messing up. He described a lunch tray that had consisted of instant rice, improperly prepared: “So, if you can’t follow the instructions on the instant rice bag…”

He wrote about a former cellmate who had recently been executed. Rojem considered him to be a good, decent man even though he was regarded as a monster by the rest of the world. He knew this was how he was seen, too. “I’ve lost many friends since 1985.”

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Death penalty

The Death Penalty

DEATH PENALTY

Death Penalty Essay

Death penalty:

A flood warning in effect for McMullen County

Jury recommends death penalty for ex-prison guard trainee who murdered 5 women inside Florida bank

2 flood warnings in effect for 5 counties in the area

Race, Human Rights, and the U.S. Death Penalty

International Context on Race and Human Rights

Evidence of Race Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty

Graph from Baldus, et al., Racial Discrimination and the Death Penalty in the Post-Furman Era: An Empirical and Legal Overview with Recent Findings from Philadelphia, Cornell Law Review ( 1998 ).

Image from the Philadelphia ​ “ Looking Deathworthy” study, Eberhardt, et al., Looking Deathworthy: Perceived Stereotypicality of Black Defendants Predicts Capital-Sentencing Outcomes, Psychological Science ( 2006 ).

Reframing the Death Penalty as a Human Rights Issue Rather than a Legitimate Tool of Public Safety

Oklahoma Prepares to Kill Another Man Who Says He’s Innocent

An Insufficient Defense

Easy Scapegoat

Failure to Mitigate

Image from the Philadelphia “ Looking Deathworthy” study, Eberhardt, et al., Looking Deathworthy: Perceived Stereotypicality of Black Defendants Predicts Capital-Sentencing Outcomes, Psychological Science ( 2006 ).