“I share here so that we remember the death penalty is more than an idea where some people have strong views on both sides, and others do not know much about it. At bottom, the death penalty and executions are about our government, through elected officials and public servants, killing citizens on purpose, with premeditation, and by design,” Dale Baich, the former former head of the Capital Habeas Unit at the Federal Defender’s Office in Arizona, writes in his Ohio State Criminal article, “Reality v. Illusion: What I Saw When I Witnessed 16 Executions,” in the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law. In a matter-of-fact style, Baich conveys the horror of state killing, from the lethal injection protocols designed to camouflage the cruelty and pain of lethal injection to the fake “operating room” set-up in the execution chamber.
“The death penalty is both unavoidably flawed and unworthy of a decent society,” the The New York Times Editorial Board states in its recent editorial, “The Death Penalty is Even More Horrifying Than You Think.” The board notes the “cruel and unjust development” of the spike in executions last year, the highest number since 2009. In a point-by-point argument, The Times stresses the utter barbarity of the death penalty, including its rampant racism, the fact that those sentenced to death are not the “worst of the worst,” but are, instead, those with intellectual disabilities, or those too poor to hire good lawyers, the number of botched executions, and the fact that 202 people have been exonerated from death row based on evidence of innocence since 1973. “This editorial board has long argued for the abolition of the death penalty. It is a form of institutionalized vengeance that causes a society to mimic the behavior of its worst offenders,” the board states.
“The sexualization of women capital defendants is an ongoing and pervasive problem that undermines the quality of justice women receive,” Phillips Black Associate Attorney and Mitigation Specialist Nathalie Greenfield, and Cornell Law School Clinical Professor and Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide Faculty Director, Sandra L. Babcock, conclude in their article, “Sex on Trial.” They examine the case of 62-year-old Brenda Andrew, sentenced to death in 2004 in Oklahoma for the murder of her husband, as a starting point, and proceed to “analyze the cases of all women currently sentenced to death in the United States to determine how their bodies have been put on trial. Our research reveals that the prosecution’s tactics in Ms. Andrew’s case were far from unique. Indeed, prosecutors introduced sexualizing evidence in 71% of these cases, ranging from testimony regarding women’s sexual experiences to judgments of their appearance,” they write. In January 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court sent Andrew’s case back to an appeals court to determine whether she had been convicted after being sex-shamed by prosecutors. But in January, the 10th Circuit upheld the conviction in a 3-0 decision, finding that the jury “had overwhelming evidence of guilt unrelated to Ms. Andrew’s sexual conduct,” the Oklahoman reported.
Kevin Sack’s book, A Soaring History of Mother Emanuel, the Church That Endured a Massacre, “is a masterpiece,” Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy states at the beginning of his New York Times review of the book that explores the historical significance of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Nine congregants, who had gathered there for Bible study on June 17, 2015, were shot to death by Dylann Roof, a self-proclaimed white supremacist, at Mother Emanuel. “Few can compete with Dylann Roof as an emblem of the sickening persistence of racial violence in the post-Civil Rights age,” Sack writes. “That the cosmos inflicted such a desecration, at the hands of someone so trifling, upon a people already steeped in such suffering, felt like the cruelest of twists,” he writes.
Artist Toby Lee Greenberg, whose work frequently centers on the cruelty of the death penalty, will be exhibiting “Biography: Unwritten,” which she describes as “an interactive installation of artist-created books—each sealed shut with cement—dedicated to those exonerated from death row and inviting viewers to engage with lives interrupted, and stories left untold,” as part of the 2026 Spring Symposium, “Fact, Fiction, and the Future of Our Criminal Justice System,” May 12–13 at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice.