EXECUTIONS AND new death sentences in the US continued their sharp decline in 2008, as states wrestled with legal, moral and financial concerns about capital punishment.
Thirty-seven people were executed in nine states, the lowest total in 14 years and a 62 per cent reduction from the 98 death sentences carried out in 1999, according to statistics compiled by the non-profit Death Penalty Information Centre.
A total of 111 death sentences were handed down, the fewest since executions resumed in 1976, according to the centre, a repository of reports and research on capital punishment run largely by opponents. The total declined from 115 in 2007 and was barely a third of the numbers condemned each year in the 1990s.
The economic realities of cash-strapped state and local governments have undermined capital punishment where moral and legal arguments have failed to alter majority support for the death penalty, said Richard Dieter, a Catholic University law professor and director of the information centre.
“I don’t know that it will change public opinion, but the practical effects of the economy are just that – if you’re a politician and you have to cut something, do you want fewer police officers on the streets . . . or do you cut one death penalty and save a few million dollars?” Mr Dieter said.
“At a time when states are cutting back on teachers, police officers, health care, infrastructure and other vital services, citizens are increasingly concerned that the death penalty is not the best use of their limited resources.”
In New Mexico, the state Supreme Court ruled last year that death penalties could not be pursued unless the legislature budgeted adequate funding for legal representation of condemned inmates who could not afford their own lawyers. Utah judges also signalled that they would overturn death penalties for convicts inadequately defended.
New Jersey and New York dropped the death penalty in 2007, while a vote expected early this year in Maryland on whether to abolish capital punishment has been driven in part by taxpayers’ shock at reports that each of the five executions there cost about $37 million (€26.5 million).
In California, home to one in five of the country’s condemned prisoners, prosecutors are wary of seeking death penalties when life without parole accomplishes the objective of keeping killers off the street. “District attorneys are being more selective in determining to go for the death penalty for a number of reasons, one of which is that it takes so long,” said Scott Thorpe, head of the California District Attorneys Association.
“The delays have an impact on victims’ families and on the overall costs of prosecution.”
San Quentin’s death row, the nation’s most populous, continued to grow last year, with 21 new capital judgments swelling the ranks of condemned prisoners to 677.
Executions were suspended for legal review of the state’s lethal injection procedures and reconstruction of the death chamber.
Even for those nearing the end of their appeals, there is little prospect of executions resuming in the state in the near future. A federal district judge’s 2006 order for review and redrafting of the lethal injection procedures remains tangled in state court procedural challenges. – (Los Angeles Times-Washington Post service)