Deborah White

Deborah White is a doctoral student at the Centre for Criminology, supervised by Professor Carolyn Hoyle. Her research examines the death penalty for drug trafficking cases in Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on the intersection of marginality and capital punishment, and the exercise of discretion within mandatory sentencing regimes. 

Deborah holds an MPhil in Criminological Research with Distinction from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Cambridge Australia Scholar. Her dissertation explored the history of Pre-Sentence Reports in England and Wales from 1960 to 2020 and the changing discourses of punishment, risk and rehabilitation.

Deborah graduated first in her cohort with a Master of Criminology from the University of Sydney and completed a Bachelor of Law and International Studies, where she was awarded Law Student of the Year in the Australian Women in Law Awards.

Deborah practices as a government solicitor in Sydney, specialising in criminal prosecutions, judicial inquiries into wrongful convictions and coronial inquests into deaths in custody. In 2025, she was awarded the John Hennessy Legal Scholarship by the Law Society of New South Wales to conduct comparative research on wrongful convictions and post-appeal remedies in Australia and the UK.

Deborah has volunteered for a number of Australian and international organisations, including the Public Education Foundation, Mongolian Ministry of Justice, Pacific Judicial Development Program and Amicus Missouri Death Penalty Research Project.