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 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.

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

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.

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.

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 advocated for broad criminal justice reforms, including the abolition of the death penalty. In her discussion with Dunham, she describes the major societal shift away from capital punishment, Colorado’s efforts at abolition, and the role of prosecutors in shaping change.

Read the transcript here.

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 the key role that conservative legislators are playing in abolition efforts across the U.S.

Read CCATDP's 2017 report, The Right Way, describing the growth in conservative sponsorship of death-penalty repeal legislation.

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 convict Myers, his abandonment by his original appellate attorney, and the legal hurdles that have blocked his claims of innocence and intellectual disability from being heard in court.

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 the new death sentences and executions in 2019.

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 Watch, and Seasly, a reporter at Injustice Watch, profiled 24 cases involving 25 defendants with “compelling evidence of innocence.” In the podcast, they discuss why they chose to focus on unredressed wrongful convictions, the patterns and themes that emerged in their research, and the remedies that they recommend. Warden and Seasly also address the pernicious impact of false jailhouse informant testimony, the error rate in death-penalty cases, and prosecutors' use of coercive plea deals that permit innocent prisoners to gain their freedom but deny them exoneration and compensation for their years wrongfully incarcerated on death row.

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 throughout the criminal justice system: unscientific analysis of forensic evidence, lack of scientific training for lawyers and judges, and an appellate system that values finality over fairness.