Claim OwnershipDiscussions With DPIC
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Examining issues in the death penalty system. Brought to you by the Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit organization serving the media and the public with analysis and information on issues concerning capital punishment.
102 Episodes
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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 in those suffering from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. The research has also found that late-adolescent defendants of color are disproportionately sentenced to death.
In the February 2023 edition of Discussions with DPIC, former Oregon Superintendent of Prisons Frank Thompson speaks with DPIC Managing Director Anne Holsinger about how his experiences as a corrections officer—as well as being a murder victim’s family member—have affected his views on capital punishment. Thompson oversaw the only two executions performed in Oregon in the past 50 years and was responsible for developing the execution protocol. He said the process of performing executions created “an additional group of victims” among the prison staff. Seeing the stress it caused him and his colleagues eventually led Thompson to oppose the death penalty.
Longtime civil and human rights lawyer, Diann Rust-Tierney, the executive director of Georgetown University’s Racial Justice Institute, joins DPIC executive director Robert Dunham for a discussion of race, human rights, and the U.S. death penalty. Prof. Rust-Tierney argues that the death penalty has long been misperceived as a normal public safety tool. The reality, she says, is that “from its very beginning in history, [the death penalty] was part of a legal and social system designed to keep various races in their place.” Rust-Tierney says that racial disparities in the application of the death penalty are not “unfortunate byproducts” of the punishment’s legacy of slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow segregation. “I've come to understand that the death penalty is actually operating exactly as it was intended,” she says. “It is intended to teach us whose lives are worth valuing and whose lives are not.”
In the October 2022 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Death Penalty Information Center Deputy Director Ngozi Ndulue and Data Storyteller Tiana Herring discuss DPIC’s recently released report Deeply Rooted: How Racial History Informs Oklahoma’s Death Penalty. The report looks at the racial history, present, and future of Oklahoma’s death penalty. Ndulue and Herring explore Oklahoma’s unique history, the key findings of the report, its relationship to DPIC’s earlier work, and lessons from Oklahoma’s experience that are applicable nationwide.
Former Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry and former U.S. Magistrate Judge Andy Lester, who co-chaired the bipartisan Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission, join DPIC executive director Robert Dunham in the August 2022 Discussions With DPIC podcast. Governor Henry, a Democrat, and Judge Lester, a Republican, discuss the findings of the commission’s review that led them to call for a halt to the state’s planned executions of 25 prisoners, at least until significant reforms have been adopted.
“The most critical recommendation that we made,” Governor Henry said, “was that unless and until significant reforms occur in the entire death penalty process, we should not be executing people in Oklahoma. … [I]f we're going to have the death penalty in Oklahoma, my goodness, it ought to be done right.” Lester strongly agrees. “The system, if we don't take up the bulk of these recommendations, is broken,” he says. “And we need to fix the system before moving forward.”
In the July 2022 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham and 2021-2022 DPIC Data Fellow Aimee Breaux discuss the making of DPIC’s groundbreaking Death Penalty Census database and some of its key findings. The project, the culmination of nearly five years of work, tracks the demographics and status of more than 9,700 death sentences imposed across the U.S. since the Supreme Court struck down existing death penalty statutes in 1972. The data, Dunham says, reveal “a system that is rife with error, filled with discrimination, [and] very, very difficult to fairly administer.”
In the May 2022 episode of Discussions With DPIC, Professor Alexis Hoag (pictured) of Brooklyn Law School joined DPIC Deputy Director Ngozi Ndulue for a wide-ranging conversation marking the 35th anniversary of McCleskey v. Kemp, a 1987 U.S. Supreme Court decision that rejected a constitutional challenge to the death penalty that showed strong statistical evidence of racial disparities in capital prosecutions and death sentences. Professor Hoag, formerly an attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (“LDF”), describes the decision as “critically important to our understanding of the death penalty and the inherent anti-Black racism that runs throughout it.”
In the March 2022 episode of Discussions With DPIC, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law Senior Lecturer Meredith Rountree speaks with Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham about her study of the types of evidence that influence juror decision-making at the sentencing stage of capital cases. Rountree and her co-author Dr. Mary Rose of the University of Texas, reviewed and analyzed 176 verdict forms completed by juries in federal death penalty cases, focusing on three legally controversial areas of mitigating evidence that juries found to be important to their decisions on life or death: the impact of a person’s execution on their loved ones, the sentences received by co-participants in the offense, and the role of government negligence.
The research wasn’t “just a survey of what jurors think matters,” Rountree explains. It also asked and answers important questions on “how does this fit in to their moral decision making?”
Read Meredith Rountree and Mary Rose, The Complexities of Conscience: Reconciling Death Penalty Law with Capital Jurors’ Concerns, 69 Buffalo Law Review 1237 (Dec. 2021).
New Hampshire State Representative Renny Cushing passed away earlier this month. In memory of Cushing's life and legacy, DPIC is reissuing the June 2019 podcast in which Cushing spoke with DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham. Cushing described the life-altering experience of having a close family member murdered and his journey from being a murder-family survivor to spearheading New Hampshire’s repeal of the death penalty.
In the February 2022 episode of Discussions with DPIC, federal public defender, Amanda Bass (pictured, right) and Justice for Julius advocate Cece Jones-Davis (pictured, left) speak with Death Penalty Information Center Managing Director Anne Holsinger about the questionable conviction and near execution of former Oklahoma death-row prisoner, Julius Jones. They discuss how incompetent representation and prosecutorial misconduct sent Jones to death row in Oklahoma County, how advocacy on his innocence and about racial bias in his case led to the commutation of his death sentence four hours before it was to be carried out, and what comes next in the continuing efforts to set Jones free.
In the January 2022 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Contra Costa County, California District Attorney Diana Becton, speaks with Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham about the rise in reform prosecutors across the country, the inherent flaws in capital punishment that leads her to work alongside other reform prosecutors to end the death penalty, and her efforts as district attorney to bring fairness and equity to the criminal legal system.
Becton is the first woman and first African American to serve as District Attorney in Contra Costa. Prior to becoming District Attorney in 2017, she served for twenty-two years as a judge in the county, where she was elected as the Contra County court’s Presiding Judge. She discusses with Dunham how her lived experiences shape how she sees her role as a District Attorney, the pushback against reform prosecutors who are women of color by those interested in maintaining the status quo, and the larger national movement to change America’s approach to criminal justice.
In the December 2021 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Death Penalty Information Center Deputy Director Ngozi Ndulue interviews State Representative Jean Schmidt about her work as a primary sponsor of a bill in the Ohio House of Representatives that would abolish capital punishment in the state. A long-time Republican elected official, Rep. Schmidt also served in the U.S. House of Representatives for ten years. She avidly supported the death penalty early in her career but now is an advocate of criminal justice reform. Ndulue and Schmidt discuss the Republican party’s and Schmidt’s own evolving views on capital punishment, its myriad economic and emotional costs, mistakes in the criminal legal system, and public safety. According to Schmidt, “the death penalty is creating more victims than the crime itself.”
In the November 2021 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Daniel Chen, counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, speaks with DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham about the Supreme Court case Ramirez v. Collier and death-row prisoners’ rights to religious freedom. John Ramirez has challenged Texas’ restrictions on audible prayer and physical touch by his spiritual advisor during his execution. Allowing such pastoral comfort in the execution chamber, Chen says, is about “fundamental human dignity.”
Chen describes the Becket Fund’s involvement in Ramirez and other cases involving the free exercise of religion in the execution chamber, and traces the history of audible prayer and clergy touch during executions. Texas’ policy is out of step with historical practices, including its own pre-2019 regulations, Chen explains. Chen and Dunham conclude their discussion exploring the Becket Fund’s belief that the fundamental human right to religious liberty must be protected, even “for people who might be different from us, who might have different life circumstances,” including those on death row.
In the September 2021 episode of Discussions With DPIC, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill political scientist Frank Baumgartner (pictured), one of the nation’s leading academic authorities on the death penalty, joins Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robert Dunham to discuss what research has shown about the impact of race, gender, and geography in capital cases and the current historically low level of public support for capital punishment. Asked what 50 years of data tell us about the possibility of death-penalty policy reform, Baumgartner says, “At this stage, what we really need to do is admit that [capital punishment] is a failed experiment.”
In the third episode of the Discussions with DPIC podcast’s Rethinking Public Safety series, Miriam Krinskyspeaks with DPIC Senior Director of Research and Special Projects Ngozi Ndulue about her experiences as a former federal prosecutor and the Executive Director of Fair and Just Prosecution (FJP), a network of elected prosecutors devoted to promoting fairness, equity, compassion, and fiscal responsibility in the criminal legal system.
Krinsky and Ndulue explore a range of issues during the podcast, including the injustice of the death penalty, the power of prosecutors to create change, the evolving relationship between prosecutors and law enforcement, the importance of transparency and public accountability, and myths about public safety. “In my mind,” Krinsky says, “eliminating capital punishment improves public safety.”
The July 2021 episode of Discussions with DPIC features a conversation between DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham and Marc Bookman, the co-founder and Executive Director of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation (ACCR), regarding his critically acclaimed new book, A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays.
Bookman and Dunham explore a wide range of systemic death-penalty problems addressed in the book, which was released in May 2021. The topics include mental illness, racial injustice, judicial and juror bias, ineffective representation, and prosecutorial misconduct.
In the second episode of DPIC's Rethinking Public Safety series, DPIC Managing Director Anne Holsinger interviews Dr. Karen Gedney about her 30-year career as a doctor in the Nevada prison system. Dr. Gedney speaks about how prison conditions affect the physical and mental health of prisoners, how prison bureaucracy determines the quality of care that prisoners receive, and how executions take a toll on prison staff. She tells the story of her refusal to write a prescription for execution drugs in 1989, believing that doing so violated her duty to provide medical care to prisoners. Today, Dr. Gedney is an advocate for the abolition of the death penalty, and she explains how her career influenced her views on capital punishment.Content warning: This episode includes a brief mention of sexual assault.
The April 2021 episode of Discussions with DPIC features the first episode of DPIC’s new podcast series, Rethinking Public Safety. These episodes will feature interviews with public safety officials, discussing the evolution of their views on capital punishment and how their experiences in various public safety fields influenced their thinking. The first episode is a conversation between former Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro and DPIC Senior Director of Research and Special Projects Ngozi Ndulue. Petro describes how learning about wrongful convictions and the high cost of the death penalty changed his views on capital punishment. As a state legislator, he supported a bill to reinstate Ohio’s death penalty after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the state’s previous capital punishment statute. Later, as Ohio Attorney General, he supervised 19 executions in the state. Since then, his views have changed and he now supports repealing the state’s death penalty.
In the March 31, 2021 podcast episode of Discussions with DPIC, managing director of DPIC, Anne Holsinger, and Raphael Sperry, president of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR), discuss the American Institute of Architects’ (AIA) new ethics policy prohibiting members from designing execution chambers and death-row solitary confinement cells. “Architects have been complicit in human rights abuse by designing execution chambers in the United States and spaces for solitary confinement,” Sperry explains. “We need to take responsibility and taking responsibility means stopping doing these bad things.”
In the March 2021 edition of Discussions with DPIC, Death Penalty Information Center Senior Director of Research and Special Projects Ngozi Ndulue is joined by Carine Williams — the Chief Program Strategy Officer at the Innocence Project — for a conversation about innocence, the death penalty, and “the function of freedom.” Reflecting on the gross miscarriage of justice exhibited in wrongful convictions and exonerations, Williams stresses two critical themes: death is irrevocable and ending the death penalty is simply not enough.
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This has been so informative.