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.”

Discussions With DPIC

Professor Frank Baumgartner on Death-Penalty Data, Public Opinion, and Capital Punishment as 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.”

Rethinking Public Safety, A Conversation with Executive Director of Fair and Just Prosecution, Miriam Krinsky

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.

Capital Defense Lawyer Marc Bookman Discusses His New Book and the Systemic Defects that Have Sent the Death Penalty into 'A Descending Spiral'

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.

Rethinking Public Safety: A Conversation with Former Nevada Prison Doctor, Dr. Karen Gedney

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.

Rethinking Public Safety: A Conversation with Former Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro

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.”

Ethical-Design Advocate Raphael Sperry on Why the American Institute of Architects Banned Members From Designing Death Chambers

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.

Carine Williams of the Innocence Project Discusses Death Penalty, Innocence, and ‘the Function of Freedom’

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 Ryan is the president and CEO of the Youth First Initiative. They discuss the miscarriage of justice in the case, what a posthumous pardon could mean for the state and family members of the executed men, and how the case fits in with the history of racial injustice in Virginia and current efforts to repeal the Commonwealth’s death penalty.

Injustice in Virginia: The Case of the “Martinsville 7”

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 issues related to end of life care and physician-assisted death, and he Dunham also discuss ethical issues involving physician participation in executions.

Anesthesiologist Dr. Joel Zivot on What Prisoner Autopsies Tell Us About Lethal Injection

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 Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty. Less than a month later, CDPL released its own report, Racist Roots: Origins of North Carolina’s Death Penalty. Though the styles of the two reports are very different, both address the historical ties between the death penalty and white supremacy, slavery, lynchings, and Jim Crow.

Gretchen Engel on the Racist Roots Report from the Center for Death Penalty Litigation

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 to death-penalty opponent as Illinois governor, and discuss his new book, co-authored with Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Maurice Possley, Until I Could Be Sure: How I Stopped the Death Penalty in Illinois.

Former Illinois Governor George Ryan on Commuting Death Row and His Journey from Death-Penalty Supporter to Abolitionist

In the September 2020 episode of Discussions With DPIC, Native American Rights Fund senior 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 landmark year on the question of tribal sovereignty and the death penalty. He and Dunham discuss the impact of McGirt’s affirmance of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s sovereignty over lands within the historical borders of the Creek Reservation, including the voiding of the death sentence imposed in Oklahoma’s state courts on Creek citizen Patrick Dwayne Murphy. Williams then discusses the federal government’s “very troubling” disregard of native sovereignty less than a month later in scheduling and carrying out the execution of Navajo citizen Lezmond Mitchell, the only Native American on federal death row, over the opposition of the Navajo government and tribal leaders across the country.

Native American Rights Fund Lawyer Joel Williams on Tribal Sovereignty and the U.S. Death Penalty

In the latest 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 COVID-19 in congregate-living circumstances, such as death-row.

ACLU Prison Project Director David Fathi Discusses Death-Row Conditions and COVID-19 in U.S. Prisons

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 representing North Carolina death-row prisoners in the Racial Justice Act litigation challenging their death sentences. Hill and Dunham discuss the recent North Carolina Supreme Court rulings in two Racial Justice Act cases that have the potential to change the entire landscape of North Carolina’s death penalty. Hill describes North Carolina’s history of blatant race discrimination in capital cases, how the same types of racial bias that have been found in the North Carolina cases are present in death penalty cases across the country, and the broader meaning the Racial Justice Act cases have at this transformative moment in America’s response to racial injustice.

Henderson Hill and the North Carolina Racial Justice Act

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 take place in the months leading up to an execution. Henry describes the critical, in-person work that must take place to investigate innocence claims, determine a prisoner’s competency to be executed, and tell a prisoner’s story in a clemency petition, and why it is impossible to adequately perform that work while complying with efforts to protect the public health. She also discusses the danger of performing executions during the pandemic, and the reasons why states should put executions on hold to ensure the health of prisoners, witnesses, and corrections staff.

Capital Defense Lawyer Kelley Henry on Death Penalty Litigation During a Pandemic

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.

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Discussions With DPIC

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