12:01 The Death Penalty in Context

The July 2021 episode of Discussions with DPIC features a conversation between DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham and Marc Bookman, the co-founder and Executive Director of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation (ACCR), regarding his critically acclaimed new book, A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays. Bookman and Dunham explore a wide range of systemic death-pena...

In the second episode of DPIC's Rethinking Public Safety series, DPIC Managing Director Anne Holsinger interviews Dr. Karen Gedney about her 30-year career as a doctor in the Nevada prison system. Dr. Gedney speaks about how prison conditions affect the physical and mental health of prisoners, how prison bureaucracy determines the quality of care that prisoners receive, and how executions take a t...

The April 2021 episode of Discussions with DPIC features the first episode of DPIC’s new podcast series, Rethinking Public Safety. These episodes will feature interviews with public safety officials, discussing the evolution of their views on capital punishment and how their experiences in various public safety fields influenced their thinking. The first episode is a conversation between former Oh...

In the March 31, 2021 podcast episode of Discussions with DPIC, managing director of DPIC, Anne Holsinger, and Raphael Sperry, president of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR), discuss the American Institute of Architects’ (AIA) new ethics policy prohibiting members from designing execution chambers and death-row solitary confinement cells. “Architects have been complic...

In the March 2021 edition of Discussions with DPIC, Death Penalty Information Center Senior Director of Research and Special Projects Ngozi Ndulue is joined by Carine Williams — the Chief Program Strategy Officer at the Innocence Project — for a conversation about innocence, the death penalty, and “the function of freedom.” Reflecting on the gross miscarriage of justice exhibited in wrongful convi...

In the January 2021 episode of Discussions With DPIC, Rudolph McCollum and Liz Ryan join DPIC Managing Director Anne Holsinger for a conversation about their efforts to obtain posthumous pardons for the “Martinsville 7,” seven Black men who were executed in Virginia for the alleged rape of a white woman in 1949. McCollum, a former mayor of Richmond, is the nephew of two of the executed men and Rya...

In the December 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, anesthesiologist Dr. Joel Zivot from Emory University Hospital speaks with Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham about his discoveries from the autopsies of more than 200 executed prisoners that shattered the myth that death by lethal injection was a humane and peaceful process. Dr. Zivot also lectures and writes on...

In the November 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Gretchen Engel (pictured), Executive Director of North Carolina’s Center for Death Penalty Litigation (CDPL), joins Ngozi Ndulue, Senior Director of Research and Special Projects at DPIC, for a discussion of their organizations’ recent reports on race and the death penalty. This fall, DPIC released Enduring Injustice: The Persistence of Racial...

In the October 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, former Illinois Governor George Ryan speaks with Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham about the events that persuaded him to commute the death sentences of all 167 death-row prisoners in Illinois in 2003. Ryan and Dunham delve into the Governor’s journey from death-penalty supporter as an Illinois state legislator t...

In the September 2020 episode of Discussions With DPIC, Native American Rights Fund senior staff attorney Joel Williams joins Death Penalty Information Center executive director Robert Dunham for a conversation about tribal sovereignty, the death penalty, and the historic U.S. Supreme Court ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma. Williams, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, explains how 2020 has been a landm...

In the July 2020 episode of Discussions With DPIC, David Fathi, the director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, speaks with DPIC’s Managing Director Anne Holsinger about death-row conditions across the country. Fathi speaks about the “shattering” effects of long-term death-row solitary confinement, the movement away from automatic solitary confinement for death row prisoners, and the impact of...

In the June 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Henderson Hill (pictured), Senior Counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union Capital Punishment Project, speaks with Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham about North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act. Hill, who has spent decades as a public defender, capital defense attorney, and civil rights advocate, is currently repr...

In the May 2020 edition of Discussions with DPIC, Executive Director Robert Dunham speaks with Kelley Henry, a Supervisory Assistant Federal Public Defender in Nashville, Tennessee who has represented Tennessee death-row prisoners for more than twenty years. They discuss the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on capital litigation, especially the final investigations and clemency efforts that tak...

In the April 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Denver District Attorney Beth McCann (pictured) speaks with Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham about Colorado’s repeal of capital punishment. McCann was elected DA in 2016, as part of a nationwide wave of reform-oriented prosecutors. Both as prosecutor and in her eight years in the Colorado legislature, McCann has a...

In the March 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Hannah Cox (pictured), National Manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty (CCATDP) speaks with Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham about the continuing movement by social and political conservatives away from capital punishment, how the death penalty is out of step with core conservative values, and...

In the February 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, members of Myers’ legal team tell the story of how racial bias, poor representation, and judicial override led to the possible wrongful conviction of an intellectually disabled man. Assistant Federal Defender Kacey Keeton and Investigator Sara Romano speak with DPIC Managing Director Anne Holsinger and describe the shoddy evidence used to conv...

In the December 2019 edition of the Discussions with DPIC podcast, Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham and Managing Director Anne Holsinger discuss DPIC’s 2019 Year End Report. The podcast explores the major themes presented in the year’s death-penalty news and developments, including innocence, declining use of capital punishment, and systemic problems revealed by th...

Rob Warden and John Seasly speak with Anne Holsinger about their law review article and profile series, “Unrequited Innocence,” which examine death-penalty cases in which prisoners have not been exonerated, despite strong evidence of innocence. Warden, the Executive Director Emeritus of the Center on Wrongful Convictions and a co-founder of both the National Registry of Exonerations and Injustice...

James Rytting, an attorney who represented Texas prisoner Larry Swearingen, describes the junk science used to convict his client. Swearingen was executed on August 21, 2019, after multiple courts declined to consider new evidence that revealed flaws in the forensic evidence presented at trial. Rytting also explains how Swearingen's case highlights flaws that contribute to wrongful convictions thr...

Writer/director Chinonye Chukwu speaks with DPIC Senior Director of Research and Special Projects Ngozi Ndulue about her award-winning new film, Clemency. Chukwu discusses her inspiration for the story, the years-long process of research and immersion that helped her shape the narrative, and her hopes for how this film will be received. Clemency stars Alfre Woodard as death-row prison warden Berna...

In the latest episode of Discussions with DPIC, New Hampshire State Representative Renny Cushing talks with DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham about the life-altering experience of having a close family member murdered and his journey from being a murder-family survivor to spearheading New Hampshire’s recent repeal of the death penalty. Cushing—whose father and brother-in-law were killed in sep...

Emmy- and Oscar-winner Edward Zwick speaks about his latest film, Trial By Fire, in the latest episode of Discussions with DPIC. Zwick produced and directed Trial By Fire, which tells the story of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was convicted and sentence to death in 1992 for the alleged arson homicide of his three children. Arson investigators who testified against him used flawed methods, and a jai...

In the latest episode of Discussions with DPIC, Dr. Katherine Beckett (pictured, left) and Dr. Heather Evans (pictured, right), authors of “The Role of Race in Washington State Capital Sentencing: 1981-2014,” discuss their research and its impact on the Washington Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the state’s death penalty. Their study was heavily cited by the court in State v. Gregory, the...

Robin Konrad, former DPIC Director of Research and Special Projects, joins Executive Director Robert Dunham and current Director of Research and Special Projects Ngozi Ndulue to discuss DPIC's November 2018 report, Behind the Curtain: Secrecy and the Death Penalty in the United States. Konrad, the lead author of the report, gives an overview of the recent expansion of secrecy in the use of the dea...

Members of the DPIC staff discuss key themes from the 2018 Year End Report in the latest episode of Discussions with DPIC. Robert Dunham, Ngozi Ndulue, and Anne Holsinger delve into the major death-penalty trends and news items of the year, including the "extended trend" of generational lows in death sentencing and executions, election results that indicate the decline will likely continue, and th...