Death Penalty Worldwide’s New Look!

As some of our regular users have undoubtedly noticed, Death Penalty Worldwide has a new, more dynamic home page, thanks to the brilliant design team at Cornell Law School. In addition to a new color scheme and photos, the Cornell team improved the look of our advanced search page instructions. The result is a brighter and cleaner presentation that makes our content easier to read and understand.

Cornell Law School is an ideal new home for us. With four full-time faculty members whose research interests and professional experience focus largely on efforts to limit the application of the death penalty in the United States and abroad, Cornell is one of the leading centers on scholarship and advocacy around capital punishment. John Blume and Sheri Johnson both have rich scholarly and litigation backgrounds, particularly in the area of racial and ethnic disparities in the administration of the death penalty. They have also been at the forefront of efforts to require states to conform to the Supreme Court’s mandate in Atkins v. Virginia (2002) barring the execution of persons with intellectual disability. Keir Weyble is one of the nation’s leading experts in the area of capital post-conviction remedies.

My research interests lie in the application of international norms restricting the death penalty, including the prohibition on the execution of individuals with mental illnesses and intellectual disabilities and the right to effective legal representation. My clinic students play a key role in the work of Death Penalty Worldwide: over the last nine years, I have taken 60 students to Malawi to improve access to justice for prisoners there. Our most recent project aims to obtain new sentencing hearings for Malawian prisoners who were formerly sentenced to death under the now-defunct mandatory sentencing regime. As of today, fifty-two prisoners have been released as a result of this project.

Delphine Lourtau remains Death Penalty Worldwide’s Research Director. She is currently piloting several research projects that will lead to new publications in 2016. Delphine is fluent in four languages, and her expertise in comparative research has been vital to DPW’s emergence as the most accessible and comprehensive source for international data on the death penalty.

Best wishes to all of our users for the new year ahead.