On June 6, 2000, the Department of Justice released an overview of the death penalty system.

Read a March 1, 2012, article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about a study that suggested changes to Missouri’s system of capital punishment.

Paul J. Litton is associate professor at the University of Missouri School of Law. His specialties include capital punishment, criminal law and morality, and bioethics.  

Dan Malone is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has worked for various magazines and newspapers in Texas. He has taught classes at Tarleton State University and the University of North Texas. His writing and research interests include the death penalty, immigration and criminal justice. Malone is co-author of America’s Condemned: Death Row Inmates in Their Own Words.

Read a June 29, 2013, story from The New York Times about Texas’ record of executed inmates’ last words. The state, with the highest number of executions in the U.S., keeps an online database of the executed’s last words.

Mark A. Costanzo is a psychology professor at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif. He is an expert on the death penalty, nonverbal communication, expert testimony and social psychology. He wrote Just Revenge: Costs and Consequences of the Death Penalty.

Defense lawyer Gregory J. Kuykendall specializes in capital cases and wrote about the politics of death sentencing in Arizona. He is also lead death penalty counsel to the Mexican Foreign Ministry.

John D. Carlson is associate professor of religious studies at Arizona State University. His books include, as co-editor, Religion and the Death Penalty: A Call for Reckoning. His work focuses on religion, ethics and politics.

John C. McAdams is a political scientist at Marquette University in Milwaukee whose research focuses on congressional politics, social class and elections and capital punishment. He has written that he favors capital punishment, even if it doesn’t work as a deterrent.