H.E. Miller, Jr. and Bradley MacLean, authors of a recent study on the application of Tennessee's death penalty (https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/study-the-death-penalty-in-tennessee-is-a-cruel-lottery), join DPIC's Anne Holsinger to discuss the findings from their article, Tennessee's Death Penalty Lottery. Miller and MacLean examined whether death sentences and executions in Tennessee are influenced by arbitrary factors like geography, race, and quality of representation. The application of Tennessee's death penalty, they find, is still as unconstitutionally arbitrary as any of the systems that were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in Furman v. Georgia in 1972.

Harvard Law Professor Carol Steiker, co-author of the highly acclaimed book, Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment (https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/books-courting-death-the-supreme-court-and-capital-punishment), joins DPIC’s Robin Konrad for a provocative discussion of the past and future of America’s death penalty. Professor Steiker, who served as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, takes us inside the walls of the court for insights on the justices’ approaches to capital-punishment jurisprudence and the impact of Justice Marshall’s legacy on the Court today. She explains the relationship between lynching and the rise of the modern death penalty in the United States, discusses the plunge in death-penalty usage since the 1990s, and offers thoughts on the future prospects for capital punishment in America.

New York Times Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Nicholas Kristof used the power of his pen to focus national attention on the troubling case of California death-row prisoner, Kevin Cooper and to urge Governor Jerry Brown to authorize DNA testing that could resolve outstanding issues of Cooper’s guilt or innocence. Kristof’s May 20 column in the Sunday Times asked: Was Kevin Cooper Framed for Murder? Mr. Kristof joins DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham to answer that question and to discuss how the Cooper case is the embodiment of some of the most intractable systemic failures in the American death-penalty system. To read Mr. Kristof’s column on Kevin Cooper: https://www.nytimes.com/intera...

Alfred Dewayne Brown was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in 2005 in Harris County, Texas, for the murder of a police officer. Brian Stolarz, attorney and author of the recent novel Grace and Justice on Death Row, represented Brown in his post-conviction appeals and, in 2015, won his freedom. In this podcast, Mr. Stolarz speaks with DPIC’s Robin Konrad about the legal issues in Brown’s case, discussing the culture of conviction and the prosecutorial misconduct that led to Brown’s wrongful conviction. Stolarz offers suggestions that he believes can help protect the innocent from wrongful convictions and death sentences.

Stephen B. Bright, the former President of the Southern Center for Human Rights, discusses the ongoing problem of racial discrimination in jury selection in death-penalty cases—an issue he has argued three times in the U.S. Supreme Court. He speaks with DPIC’s Anne Holsinger about the most recent of those cases, Foster v. Chatman, in which the Court granted Mr. Foster a new trial as a result of intentional discrimination by Columbus, Georgia prosecutors. He explains how the prosecutors' notes, a piece of evidence that is rarely available, were critical in proving that prosecutors had targeted African-American jurors because of their race, and describes newly obtained jury selection notes that show Columbus prosecutors systematically struck African-American jurors in at least seven other capital cases. Mr. Bright explains why current law provides an insufficient remedy for this problem and offers suggestions to prevent the pervasive exclusion of people of color from death-penalty juries.

Lawyer Thomas Carver joins Robin Konrad, DPIC’s Director of Research and Special Projects, to discuss the case of his client, Ulysses Jones, a terminally ill federal prisoner who was charged with capital murder in Springfield, Missouri. Carver, who has been practicing law in Missouri for over forty years, explains what happened in his client’s case, how he and his team avoided a death sentence for their client, and what this case says about broader death-penalty issues in Missouri and the federal court system.

In 2016, both the U.S. Supreme Court and the Florida Supreme Court struck down Florida’s death-sentencing statute. Since then, the Florida courts and legislature have been figuring out how to apply those decisions to the nearly 400 condemned prisoners on the state’s death row. Executive Director Robert Dunham interviews Karen Gottlieb, the Co-Director of the Florida Center for Capital Representation at Florida International University, who discusses the court cases and what has happened in Florida as a result, including explaining how the decision has been interpreted to apply to only half of the prisoners who were unconstitutionally sentenced to death under the old law.

Robin Konrad, DPIC’s Director of Research and Special Projects, interviews University of Virginia law professor Brandon Garrett about his new book End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice. Professor Garrett researched and analyzed all the death sentences imposed in the U.S. during the past 25 years to determine what factors have led to the precipitous decline in the number of people who are being sentenced to death. In this podcast, Professor Garrett discusses these factors, which include a decrease in murder rates, the creation of state-wide public defender offices, and jurors who are increasingly unwilling to return death sentences.

Ohio has not carried out an execution since the botched execution of Dennis McGuire in January 2014, but is scheduled to resume executions on July 26, 2017. In the past several years, the State has revised its lethal-injection protocol and has created a task force that studied Ohio’s death-penalty system. DPIC’s Executive Director Robert Dunham talks with Michael Benza, Senior Instructor in Law at Case Western Reserve University and veteran capital defense attorney, about the results of the task force’s study, the concerns about going forward with executions, and the status of the lethal-injection litigation.