Attend Events

When Due Process Fails: How the Death Penalty Ensnares the Innocent 
Students at Georgetown Law, in partnership with the University of Texas School of Law’s Capital Punishment Center and George Washington Law, hosted an online panel on April 6, 2026. The discussion examined the case of Charles Flores, which is currently pending before the U.S Supreme Court, and explored the due process concerns it raises. 

The panel brought together leading voices in the field, including Georgetown Law Professor Cliff Sloan, Harvard Law Professor Carol Steiker, death row exoneree Anthony Graves, and Charles’s attorney, Gretchen Sween. 

Watch a recording of the event here.

TCADP Webinar: Marking 20 Years of Roper v. Simmons and Redrawing the Line
Roper v. Simmons was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case in which the Justices ruled the death penalty for individuals under age 18 at the time of the crime is unconstitutional.

The 5-4 decision, issued on March 1, 2005, was based on the idea that executing juveniles violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. The decision spared the lives of 72 people nationwide, including 29 people in Texas who had been sentenced to death for crimes that occurred when they were 17 years old.

Yet many of the same reasons cited in the Roper decision, including lack of maturity or impulse control and what we know about brain development, apply to another group of individuals who should be exempt from the death penalty: Those ages 18 to 20 at the time of the crime. In 2025, TCADP supported House Bill 2055 by State Representative Joe Moody, which would have rendered individuals under the age of 21 at the time of the crime ineligible for the death penalty. 

On March 25, 2025, TCADP hosted a special webinar featuring attorneys, professors, students, and friends of individuals who were sentenced to death in Texas for crimes that occurred when they were 18, 19, or 20 years old.

Watch a recording of the webinar.

TCADP 2026 Annual Conference Keynote Address
Corinna Barrett Lain is the S. D. Roberts & Sandra Moore Professor of Law at the University of Richmond School of Law and the author of Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection. She is one of the nation’s leading authorities on the death penalty, presenting her work at national and international conferences and publishing in the top law journals in the country. Her work has appeared in the Stanford Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Duke Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, and Georgetown Law Journal, among other venues, and has been cited by numerous courts, including a concurring opinion of the United States Supreme Court.

Lain is also one of the leading voices on criminal justice in Virginia more broadly, lecturing at annual conferences for the bench and bar and serving as the principal co-author of Thompson-West’s Virginia Practice Series on criminal law, a four-volume treatise that serves as the authoritative guide for Virginia criminal law and procedure. In 2023-2024 alone, the Virginia Practice Series was cited 25 times by Virginia appellate courts, including five times by the Supreme Court of Virginia.

Lain graduated summa cum laude from the College of William and Mary, and received her J.D. from the University of Virginia, where she served on the managing board of the Virginia Law Review and was elected to Order of the Coif. She clerked on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals and then served as a state prosecutor in Richmond, Virginia, before joining the Richmond Law faculty in 2001. Lain is a former sergeant in the United States Army and a recipient of the University of Richmond’s Distinguished Educator Award, the highest award that the University bestows.

Watch a recording the keynote address here.