Menu
Robert Dunham is a lawyer and internationally recognized expert on the death penalty with more than thirty years of experience in death penalty policy and practice. He is Special Counsel to the non-profit public interest law firm, Phillips Black, Inc., and the founder and director of the Death Penalty Policy Project, which he launched on July 1, 2023 after eight years as Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Before joining DPIC, Mr. Dunham was one of the leading capital appeal lawyers in Pennsylvania, arguing on behalf of the Commonwealth’s death-row prisoners in its state and federal courts and in the United States Supreme Court. He is also an adjunct professor of death penalty law at the Temple University Beasley School of Law,
During his tenure as its Executive Director, DPIC produced groundbreaking reports on execution secrecy and race and the U.S. death penalty, modernized its award-winning website, and assembled its Death Penalty Census of more than 9,750 death sentences imposed in the U.S. in the past fifty years — the most extensive database of its kind. He is the author of numerous DPIC special reports and policy analyses, including DPIC’s annual year-end reports, its 2021 Special Report: The Innocence Epidemic, its 2017 study on murder rates, police safety, and the absence of any death penalty deterrent, and analyses on such issues as human rights abuses in the U.S. death penalty, the use of the death penalty against individuals with intellectual disability and late adolescent offenders, causes of wrongful capital convictions, and how the use or threat of the death penalty has led to wrongful capital and non-capital convictions, among others.
Mr. Dunham previously served as Executive Director of the former Pennsylvania Capital Case Resource Center; Director of Training of the Capital Habeas Unit of the Philadelphia federal defender’s office; and as an assistant federal defender in the Harrisburg federal defender’s capital habeas unit. Collectively, the offices obtained more than 300 stays of execution and overturned more than 150 unconstitutional capital convictions or death sentences, limiting Pennsylvania to three executions, all of mentally ill prisoners who waived their appeals. He started his legal career as a litigation associate at Schnader, Harrison, Segal & Lewis in Philadelphia, where he handled his first pro bono capital case. He also served five years as a legislative assistant to State Representative Robert W. O’Donnell, later the Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.
Mr. Dunham has spoken at numerous national and international death penalty events and conferences, provided death penalty briefings to the international diplomatic corps, and taught in death penalty training programs offered by national, state, and local courts, bar associations, and professional organizations. He taught death penalty law as an adjunct professor at Villanova Law School for eleven years and was a visiting scholar at Oklahoma State University, where he taught a multi-university undergraduate honors course on capital punishment. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Witness to Innocence and has previously served on the Steering Committee of the American Bar Association’s Death Penalty Representation Project and on the board of directors of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project and the Pennsylvania Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, among others.