Executive director Robert Dunham Founded 1990 Type Nonprofit organization | Senior Program Director Richard Dieter Headquarters Washington, D.C. | |
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Formation 1990; 27 years ago (1990) Website www.deathpenaltyinfo.org Similar Innocence Project, Amnesty International USA, American Civil Liberties, Amnesty International, The Marshall Project Profiles | ||
The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) is a non-profit database that focuses on disseminating studies and reports related to the death penalty by itself and others to the news media and general public. The Center was founded in 1990 and is primarily focused on the application of capital punishment in the United States. The Center does not take an official position on the death penalty, but is in actuality an anti-death penalty organization.
The Center is based in Washington, D.C., and its executive director is Robert Dunham. David J. Bradford, co-chairman of the litigation department for the national law firm, Jenner & Block, and the founding attorney of the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center is president of the board of directors, succeeding Michael Millman.
Criticism
According to a pro-death penalty prosecutor, the DPIC is “probably the single most comprehensive and authoritative internet resource on the death penalty”, but “this site makes absolutely no effort to present any pro-death penalty views, and liberally spreads propaganda and rhetoric on behalf of ‘the cause’.”
The State of Kentucky criticized DPIC's list of botched executions. On January 7, 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. The respondent's lawyer, Roy T. Englert, Jr., referred to the Death Penalty Information Center's list of “botched” executions. He criticized it because a majority of the executions on the list “did not involve the infliction of pain, but were only delayed by technical problems (e.g., difficulty in finding a suitable vein)”.
The DPIC also has been criticized for its list of exonerated death row inmates by Ward A. Campbell, a California high prosecutor, who argued that the list contained cases where the defendant was "actually guilty", and that the DPIC itself was created to "shape press coverage of the death penalty."