This year, for the first time in the modern history of the death penalty, no single county in the United States imposed more than two death sentences.
That stands in stark contrast to many years in which the use of capital punishment was more concentrated in counties like Philadelphia, Harris County (which includes Houston) and Los Angeles.
“The patterns are more striking this year than the numbers themselves,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that issued an annual report on executions and death sentences on Friday.
The number of executions and new death sentences remained low by historical standards, the report said, despite a small uptick. For the fourth consecutive year there will have been fewer than 30 executions in the United States; before this recent stretch, executions had been above that level every year since 1991.
And the use of capital punishment still remains largely a matter of geography. Only 14 states and the federal government imposed death sentences, with more than half coming from four states: Texas, Florida, California and Ohio. California, which has by far the largest death row population in the country, has not carried out an execution since 2006 amid challenges to its method of lethal injection. In October, Washington became the 20th state to abolish the death penalty after a court ruled it unconstitutional.
The 25 executions carried out this year were in just eight states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Nebraska, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas — reflecting the relative popularity of capital punishment in the South and especially in Texas, which alone accounted for 13 executions. (At the current pace, it would take about a century to execute everyone now on death row in the United States.)
Among those killed was Carey Dean Moore, who was executed by lethal injection in Nebraska for killing two taxi drivers, after a German pharmaceutical manufacturer failed in its legal battle to stop the state from using its products to carry out the sentence. Edmund Zagorski’s last words were “Let’s rock” before he died in Tennessee’s electric chair, a method he chose because he felt it would mean less agony than lethal injection. On Tuesday, Alvin Braziel Jr. was executed in Texas after apologizing to the wife of the man he murdered “for her husband dying at my hand.”
Mr. Dunham defines the death penalty’s modern era as beginning in 1972, when executions were halted after the Supreme Court ruled 5-to-4 that capital punishment, as it was imposed, violated the Constitution, but left open the possibility that states could continue using it if they revised their statutes.
Executions resumed in 1977, and by the late 1990s, more than 50 were being carried out every year.
Select counties sent the condemned to death row in double-digit numbers — just 15 counties accounted for almost a third of all executions from 1977 to 2012. Even that wasn’t enough, in the view of Dale Cox, the former acting district attorney in Caddo Parish, La., one such death penalty stronghold. “I think we need to kill more people,” he famously said.
But critics say capital punishment is still imposed arbitrarily, prompting Justice Stephen G. Breyer to note two years ago that “individuals who are executed are not the ‘worst of the worst,’ but, rather, are individuals chosen at random, on the basis, perhaps of geography, perhaps of the views of individual prosecutors, or still worse on the basis of race.”
Many factors have worked to slow the pace of death sentences and executions in recent years, including pharmaceutical companies trying to prevent their drugs from being used in lethal injections, and moratoriums in some states.
But declining public support has been the main driver of the slowdown. For the first time since Gallup started asking the question in 2000, fewer than half of people surveyed said they believed the punishment was applied fairly. And only 56 percent supported the death penalty for murder, down from 80 percent in 1994.
That has translated into more skeptical jurors. Though national data on how juries vote is hard to come by, some prosecutors have cited juror reluctance in explaining a retreat from seeking the death penalty.
Voters have also had an impact. In almost a dozen of the 30 counties with the highest pace of death sentences, prosecutors have been voted out of office since 2015, Mr. Dunham said.
In 2015, Caddo Parish elected a former judge, James E. Stewart Sr., as its first African-American district attorney.
While he is currently pursuing the death penalty against a man accused of killing a police officer, it would be the first death sentence in Caddo in four years.
Source: nytimes.com, Richard A. Oppel Jr., December 14, 2018
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
