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James R.  Acker

Distinguished Teaching Professor
School of Criminal Justice

Expertise:
The death penalty; history of capital punishment in the United States and New York.

Campus phone: (518) 442-5317
Campus email: jacker@albany.edu

Biography:
The death penalty remains one of the most bitterly disputed issues facing legislators and appellate courts across the U.S. James R. Acker has extensive scholarship in areas of death penalty law and the judicial uses of social science research. He has co-authored a series of articles examining capital punishment legislation, which appeared in the Criminal Law Bulletin, and co-authored, with Robert M. Bohm and Charles S. Lanier, America's Experiment With Capital Punishment (Carolina Academic Press, 1998). Acker, a Distinguished Teaching Professor in  UAlbany's School of Criminal Justice, is co-director of the Capital Punishment Research Initiative (CPRI) at UAlbany. Acker helped establish in 2005 the National Death Penalty Archives (NDPA), a national repository of archival material devoted solely to the death penalty. It is located at the University's M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives.