Gretchen Engel on the Racist Roots Report from the Center for Death Penalty Litigation

In the November 2020 episode of Discussions with DPIC, Gretchen Engel (pictured), Executive Director of North Carolina’s Center for Death Penalty Litigation (CDPL), joins Ngozi Ndulue, Senior Director of Research and Special Projects at DPIC, for a discussion of their organizations’ recent reports on race and the death penalty. This fall, DPIC released Enduring Injustice: The Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty. Less than a month later, CDPL released its own report, Racist Roots: Origins of North Carolina’s Death Penalty. Though the styles of the two reports are very different, both address the historical ties between the death penalty and white supremacy, slavery, lynchings, and Jim Crow.