Articles

“We don’t need more death. We need more care.” — Anna Lee, victim family member
- In a December 9, 2025, opinion article in The Tennessean, Anna Lee, a murder-victim family member whose beloved great-uncle’s killer, Nick Sutton, was executed six years ago explains how the death penalty has not brought her family healing or justice. In the piece, Ms. Lee compassionately describes the long-term emotional and financial toll the capital punishment system imposes…

On November 19, 2025, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released Fatal Flaws: Innocence, Race and Wrongful Convictions, the second installment in its multi-part series examining racialized and structural failures in the nation’s capital punishment system. The first report of the series, Fatal Flaws: Revealing the Racial and Religious Gerrymandering of the Capital Jury, explored how the process of death qualification distorts the composition of capital juries. This newly published…

This is the first in a new monthly series covering academic research and articles in the field of capital punishment. In the 2020 article, ​“Queer and Unusual: Capital Punishment, LGBTQ+ Identity, and the Constitutional Path Forward,” Matt Kellner surveys the legal and historical landscape of anti-queerness in the death penalty throughout history. He begins by highlighting the illustrative case of Charles Rhines. Mr. Rhines, a gay man, was sentenced to death on January 26, 1993 in South Dakota…

The American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section has released its annual report, The State of Criminal Justice 2021, examining major issues, trends, and significant changes in America’s criminal justice system. The annual bar publication includes a chapter devoted to significant developments in capital punishment, authored by Ronald J. Tabak, chair of the Death Penalty Committee of the ABA’s Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice and a longtime member of the Steering Committee of…

For the first time in its history, National Geographic magazine has tackled the subject of capital punishment. Sentenced to death, but innocent, a feature story in the March 2021 issue of the magazine, chronicles the stories of fifteen death-row exonerees and illuminates the pervasive issue of innocence and the death penalty in the United States. The article, released on the same day as the Death Penalty Information Center’s new report The Innocence Epidemic, uses DPIC data and compelling…

The American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section has released The State of Criminal Justice 2020, its annual report on issues, trends, and significant changes in America’s criminal justice system. The ABA book includes a chapter on significant capital punishment developments over the past year, authored by Ronald J. Tabak, chair of the Death Penalty Committee of the ABA’s Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice. Tabak’s analysis highlights the continuing long-term downward trend in…

As the death penalty continues to wilt across the country, whatever penological justification it once purportedly served is dying as well, say capital punishment scholars Carol Steiker and Jordan Steiker (pictured). In their new article The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of the Death Penalty in the United States in the January 2020 Annual Review of Criminology, the Steikers examine four central issues in the rise and fall of the death penalty in the United States and explore what an American…

A bipartisan coalition of Wyoming legislators has introduced a bill to abolish the state’s death penalty. On January 15, 2019, Cheyenne Republican State Representative Jared Olsen (pictured, left) and Republican State Senator Brian Boner (pictured, right), introduced HB145, which would repeal the death penalty and replace it with a judicially imposed sentence of life without parole or life imprisonment. The bill, co-sponsored by sixteen other representatives and senators, has the backing of…

On January 11, 2019, the Florida Clemency Board unanimously granted posthumous pardons to the ​“Groveland Four,” four young African-American men falsely accused of raping a young white woman in Lake County, Florida in 1949. During the racist hysteria following the accusation, white mobs burned down black residences, a massive white posse lynched a black suspect, all-white juries condemned two innocent men to death and an innocent teen to a life sentence, and a racist sheriff murdered one of the…