[7] In June 2022, on the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Furman v. Georgia, DPI released its Death Penalty Census, which covers the period from 1972 to January 1, 2021.
[11] DPI releases an annual report on the death penalty,[12] highlighting significant developments and trends and featuring the latest statistics.
[15] Associated Press described the report as "a history lesson in how lynchings and executions have been used in America and how discrimination bleeds into the entire criminal justice system.
It traces a line from lynchings of old—killings outside the law—where Black people were killed in an effort to assert social control during slavery and Jim Crow, and how that eventually translated into state-ordered executions.
[19] In February 2021, DPI issued a Special Report: The Innocence Epidemic, analyzing the causes and demographics of the wrongful capital convictions and death sentences that had led to the then-185 death-row exonerations since 1973.
In 2008, the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral arguments in Baze v. Rees, a case challenging the three-drug cocktail used for many executions by lethal injection.
[21] The majority and dissenting justices of the U.S. Supreme Court cited data on the DPI webpage a total of eight times—and in all three opinions—in the 2015 lethal injection case, Glossip v.