12:01 The Death Penalty in Context

In this month’s episode of Discussions with DPIC, Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with former death-sentenced prisoner Anthony Graves. Exonerated from Texas’ death row in 2010, Mr. Graves has since become an advocate for criminal justice reform, creating the Anthony Graves Foundation, working with the ACLU and Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, and testifying before the U.S. Sen...

In this month's episode of Discussions with DPIC, Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with John Bessler (pictured), of Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law. Professor Bessler is the author of several books on the death penalty, including his 2023 book The Death Penalty's Denial of Fundamental Human Rights: International Law, State Practice, and the Emerging Abolitionis...

In this month’s Discussions with DPIC, Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with Sandra Babcock (pictured), Clinical Professor at Cornell Law School, Faculty Director, and founder of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide. Ms. Babcock’s clinic currently represents death sentenced women in the United States, Malawi, and Tanzania and is focused on providing defense teams in retentionis...

In this month’s Discussions with DPIC, Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with Margot Ravenscroft, the Executive Director of AMICUS UK, a British charity that works to support the capital defense effort in the United States.  Ms. Ravenscroft describes how AMICUS was founded by a British woman who became a pen friend with a Louisiana death row prisoner and returned to the UK after his executio...

In the September 2023 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Anne Holsinger, Managing Director of DPIC, speaks with Pastor Rich Nathan, founding pastor of Vineyard Columbus, an evangelical Christian church based in Ohio. Mr. Nathan shares his pro-life perspective and explains how religious teachings inform his position on the death penalty.

In the August 2023 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Anne Holsinger, Managing Director of DPIC, speaks with Dr. Roya Boroumand, Executive Director of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran. A specialist in Iran’s post-World War 2 history, Dr. Boroumand provides historical context for ongoing events and discusses the current increase in executions. With the one-year anniversary o...

In the July 2023 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Anne Holsinger, Managing Director of DPIC, speaks with Kirk Bloodsworth, the first person exonerated from death row by DNA evidence. Mr. Bloodsworth reflects on the thirty years since his exoneration and discusses the experience of being wrongfully convicted. He also describes the work he and other exonerees have done, and how the issue of innocen...

In the June 2023 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Death Penalty Information Center Managing Director Anne Holsinger and Data Storyteller Tiana Herring discuss the latest Racial Justice Storytelling Report, Doomed to Repeat: The Legacy of Race in Tennessee’s Contemporary Death Penalty. The report examines the history of Tennessee’s capital punishment system, documenting the continued impact of rac...

In the latest episode of Discussions with DPIC, Anne Holsinger, Managing Director of DPIC, interviews Dr. Sally Satel (pictured), a psychiatrist and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She shares her insights on the role of severe mental illness in death penalty cases.

In the latest episode of “Discussions with DPIC,” Anne Holsinger, Managing Director of DPIC, interviews Ron McAndrew, a former Florida Prison Warden who witnessed executions using electrocution and lethal injection in Florida and Texas. He offers reflections on the negative impact that executions have on the families of both the victim and the condemned, the correctional officers, and on himself.

In the latest episode of “Discussions with DPIC,” Robert Dunham, former Executive Director of DPIC interviews Karen Steele (pictured), a researcher and defense attorney in Oregon, regarding the special characteristics of late adolescent defendants facing the death penalty. Research by Steele and others points to the incomplete brain development in those aged 18-21 and how that can be exacerbated i...

In the February 2023 edition of Discussions with DPIC, former Oregon Superintendent of Prisons Frank Thompson speaks with DPIC Managing Director Anne Holsinger about how his experiences as a corrections officer—as well as being a murder victim’s family member—have affected his views on capital punishment. Thompson oversaw the only two executions performed in Oregon in the past 50 years and was res...

Longtime civil and human rights lawyer, Diann Rust-Tierney, the executive director of Georgetown University’s Racial Justice Institute, joins DPIC executive director Robert Dunham for a discussion of race, human rights, and the U.S. death penalty. Prof. Rust-Tierney argues that the death penalty has long been misperceived as a normal public safety tool. The reality, she says, is that “from its ver...

In the October 2022 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Death Penalty Information Center Deputy Director Ngozi Ndulue and Data Storyteller Tiana Herring discuss DPIC’s recently released report Deeply Rooted: How Racial History Informs Oklahoma’s Death Penalty. The report looks at the racial history, present, and future of Oklahoma’s death penalty. Ndulue and Herring explore Oklahoma’s unique history...

Former Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry and former U.S. Magistrate Judge Andy Lester, who co-chaired the bipartisan Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission, join DPIC executive director Robert Dunham in the August 2022 Discussions With DPIC podcast. Governor Henry, a Democrat, and Judge Lester, a Republican, discuss the findings of the commission’s review that led them to call for a halt to the state...

In the July 2022 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham and 2021-2022 DPIC Data Fellow Aimee Breaux discuss the making of DPIC’s groundbreaking Death Penalty Census database and some of its key findings. The project, the culmination of nearly five years of work, tracks the demographics and status of more than 9,700 death sentences impose...

In the May 2022 episode of Discussions With DPIC, Professor Alexis Hoag (pictured) of Brooklyn Law School joined DPIC Deputy Director Ngozi Ndulue for a wide-ranging conversation marking the 35th anniversary of McCleskey v. Kemp, a 1987 U.S. Supreme Court decision that rejected a constitutional challenge to the death penalty that showed strong statistical evidence of racial disparities in capital...

In the March 2022 episode of Discussions With DPIC, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law Senior Lecturer Meredith Rountree speaks with Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham about her study of the types of evidence that influence juror decision-making at the sentencing stage of capital cases. Rountree and her co-author Dr. Mary Rose of the University of Texas, reviewed an...

New Hampshire State Representative Renny Cushing passed away earlier this month. In memory of Cushing's life and legacy, DPIC is reissuing the June 2019 podcast in which Cushing spoke with DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham. Cushing described the life-altering experience of having a close family member murdered and his journey from being a murder-family survivor to spearheading New Hampshire’s...

In the February 2022 episode of Discussions with DPIC, federal public defender, Amanda Bass (pictured, right) and Justice for Julius advocate Cece Jones-Davis (pictured, left) speak with Death Penalty Information Center Managing Director Anne Holsinger about the questionable conviction and near execution of former Oklahoma death-row prisoner, Julius Jones. They discuss how incompetent representati...

In the January 2022 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Contra Costa County, California District Attorney Diana Becton, speaks with Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham about the rise in reform prosecutors across the country, the inherent flaws in capital punishment that leads her to work alongside other reform prosecutors to end the death penalty, and her efforts as dis...

In the December 2021 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Death Penalty Information Center Deputy Director Ngozi Ndulue interviews State Representative Jean Schmidt about her work as a primary sponsor of a bill in the Ohio House of Representatives that would abolish capital punishment in the state. A long-time Republican elected official, Rep. Schmidt also served in the U.S. House of Representatives...

In the November 2021 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Daniel Chen, counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, speaks with DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham about the Supreme Court case Ramirez v. Collier and death-row prisoners’ rights to religious freedom. John Ramirez has challenged Texas’ restrictions on audible prayer and physical touch by his spiritual advisor during his execution...

In the September 2021 episode of Discussions With DPIC, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill political scientist Frank Baumgartner (pictured), one of the nation’s leading academic authorities on the death penalty, joins Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham to discuss what research has shown about the impact of race, gender, and geography in capital cases and the cu...

In the third episode of the Discussions with DPIC podcast’s Rethinking Public Safety series, Miriam Krinsky speaks with DPIC Senior Director of Research and Special Projects Ngozi Ndulue about her experiences as a former federal prosecutor and the Executive Director of Fair and Just Prosecution (FJP), a network of elected prosecutors devoted to promoting fairness, equity, compassion, and fiscal re...