CCDPW: Fighting for women and gender-diverse people

Defending human rights for women and gender-diverse people

The Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide (CCDPW) is a nonprofit dedicated to exposing discrimination in the judicial system and defending women and gender-diverse people facing extreme sentences. We know from our research that intersectional gender bias is real and weaponized inside courtrooms. The ubiquity of this discrimination makes it invisible and accepted, but we are here to change that. 

For years, CCDPW has engaged in advocacy, research, public education, and targeted litigation on behalf of the estimated 30,000 people worldwide facing execution. Our work focuses on women and gender-diverse people, but the victories we win are beneficial to all incarcerated people as we work to bring equality and fairness into deeply flawed systems. We fight for total abolition of the death penalty in all circumstances, in every country on earth. 

When we fight, we win
In January of 2025, we celebrated a monumental victory. In its decision in Andrew v. White, the Supreme Court of the United States recognized for the first time in its history that irrelevant gender stereotypes involving women’s sex lives and mothering skills have no place in a criminal courtroom. In Ms. Andrew’s case, prosecutors presented evidence detailing her intimate relationships (including one that took place twenty years before trial), the outfits she wore, and even her style of underwear. In closing argument, they dangled multiple pairs of Ms. Andrew’s underwear before the jury, arguing that it was not the sort of underwear a grieving widow would wear. 

Ms. Andrew’s case is now before a federal court of appeals. In June, one of our former colleagues and clinic students, Nathalie Greenfield JD '21–who began working on Ms. Andrew’s case as Professor Babcock’s law student–argued Ms. Andrew’s case. As we await the federal court’s decision as to whether Ms. Andrew will receive a new trial, we are reaching out to women in prisons around the country to educate them about this groundbreaking decision. We are training trial and appellate lawyers how to fight back against gender bias and raise these issues in the courts.

We are energized by this victory, but it is only the first step toward justice for Ms. Andrew and others who were convicted after unfair trials.

 Capital punishment is an affront to human rights

Women are sentenced to death for killing their abusers after lifetimes of gender-based violence in courts across the world. A study by CCDPW researchers found that at least 96% of the women on death row in the United States had survived at least one form of gender-based violence. In places like Tanzania, women are sentenced to death even when acting in self defense because the penal code makes the death penalty mandatory for murder. In Uganda, women, LGBTQIA+ folks, and trans individuals are given death sentences for consensual same sex relationship under the anti-homosexuality act. In Iran, women are being executed for standing up for basic human rights. While these contexts and judicial systems vary, the thread that unites them is the incompatibility of capital punishment to exist in societies that truly value freedom, the possibility of rehabilitation, and human rights. 

If we want to make global abolition a reality, its imperative we understand the stories, lives, and experiences of the most marginalized members of the global death row population, people who until now have been left out of the broader advocacy movements challenging capital punishment. 

To tackle this complex issue, we are training capital defense lawyers, conducting research to enlighten policy makers and courts, and working directly with women and gender diverse individuals to tell their stories. 

 This year, we also launched our Freedom Clinic training series for defense teams, with a diverse faculty of artists, organizers, and public defenders. Every participant who provided post training feedback shared that the Freedom Clinic increased their understanding of intersectional gender biases in the criminal legal system. Every participant who completed a post training survey also shared that they would recommend the Freedom Clinic to their colleagues.

We need your help to get marginalized people at risk of execution the justice they deserve. Join us in this struggle and support our efforts to eradicate capital punishment forever. Together, we can uplift human dignity and make state execution a relic of the past.

CCDPW was part of the legal team that helped save Melissa Lucio, an innocent women on death row in Texas, from execution in April 2022. We continue to fight for her release, despite the fact that a court found her to be actually innocent and recommended her sentence be overturned. 

As a registered student organization, we are committed to equal access to all of our programs and do not discriminate based on any protected identity status.