Richard C. Dieter is an attorney and native of New York City. He received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Notre Dame and a masters degree from the Ohio State University. He graduated cum laude from the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC. At Georgetown, he was one of the University's first Public Interest Law Scholars and served as an editor of the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics. He is a member of the Maryland Bar, the Bar of the District of Columbia, and the Bar of the U. S. Supreme Court, and serves as an Adjunct Professor at the Catholic University School of Law, where he teaches a seminar on the death penalty.

Mr. Dieter has been the Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, DC since 1992. The Center is a non-profit organization serving the public and the media with analysis and information on issues concerning capital punishment. The Center prepares in-depth reports, issues press releases, and conducts briefings for journalists and others working on this issue.

Mr. Dieter has worked for many years on issues related to human rights and the death penalty, including work as the director of the Community for Creative Nonviolence's pre-trial release program, the founder of the Alderson Hospitality House for visitors to the women's federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia, and the founder of the Quixote Center's death penalty project. He has given numerous speeches at universities and is frequently quoted in the major newspapers around the country. He has appeared on NBC Nightly News, ABC World News, CBS Evening News, The Today Show, PBS News Hour, Fox News, CNN, C-Span, Court-TV, and many other programs.

He has testified about the death penalty before numerous state legislatures and has prepared reports for the U. S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights. He has authored articles on the death penalty for both magazines and scholarly journals. His most recent publications are: A Crisis of Confidence: Americans' Doubts About the Death Penalty; Innocence and the Crisis in the American Death Penalty and The Death Penalty in Black and White: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Decides. He has been an invited speaker at international events in Taiwan, Tokyo, Paris, and London, and recently testified before the European Parliament in Brussels.

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