Richard C. Dieter received his law degree from the Georgetown University Law Center, where he was named a Public Interest Law Scholar. He served as the Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C. from 1992 until 2015. He authored 40 reports on the death penalty that have been widely cited in the national media and utilized at all levels of state and national government, including the U.S. Supreme Court. Mr. Dieter has been a frequent guest on national television and radio news programs and has been widely quoted in the nation’s newspapers. Mr. Dieter’s most recent publication, Battle Scars: Military Veterans and the Death Penalty (2015), received the Congressional Black Caucus’s Veterans Braintrust Award. He is currently the Principal Consultant at RDieter Communications.

Mr. Dieter served as an Adjunct Professor at the Catholic University School of Law for 14 years. He was a founder of the Pre-Trial Release Program at the Community for Creative Non-violence in Washington and the co-founder of the Alderson Hospitality House in West Virginia for visitors to the country’s main federal women’s prison. Mr. Dieter received the Frederick Douglass Human Rights Award from the Southern Center for Human Rights in 2016. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Catholic Mobilizing Network and Witness to Innocence.