While the governor of the country's most populous state halted death penalty executions, that decision may not have a national impact.
Within two southern states, Texas and Oklahoma, 5 counties are responsible for 1 in 5 executions since the death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976, according to data from the non-profit Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).
Those counties - Harris, Dallas, Bexar and Tarrant Counties in Texas and in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma - are responsible for 315 out of the 1,493 executions that have taken place in those 43 years.
Prior to California Gov. Gavin Newsom's moratorium on executions, his state performed 13 executions during the same time frame. Data from the DPIC show there are 11 individual counties across the country that had the same number or more executions themselves during that time period.
"It doesn't really make sense to talk about the death penalty in the United States. The death penalty is exclusively a Southern phenomenon," said Evan Mandery, a professor at the John Jay College for Criminal Justice.
There are 30 states that have the death penalty in the U.S., though four of those states - now including California - have governors who have issued suspensions on executions.
New Hampshire has the death penalty, but hasn't executed anyone since 1939.
Since the 1976 ruling, there have been 56 executions in Ohio, 7 in Utah, 4 in South Dakota, 3 in Montana and 1 in Utah, according to data from the DPIC. By comparison, there were 72 executions in Georgia, 97 executions in Florida, 112 executions in Oklahoma, and 113 executions in Virginia, the data shows.
To date, the largest amount of death penalty executions occurs in Texas, where there have been 560. That represents 37.5 % of the total 1,493 executions in the United States since 1976.
"Texas is an outlier among outliers," Mandery said.
Mandery said that in spite of its prevalence in certain counties, the death penalty on the whole is "an extraordinarily rare event - many, many things have to go wrong for someone to be executed in the United States."
"No rich white murderer has ever been sentenced to die, so you need to be almost certainly a person of color, probably killed a white person who did it in a state with the death penalty, who did it in a county within that state where the prosecutor aggressively supports the death penalty and where that prosecutor isn't replaced in office during the time you're on death row by someone who either opposes the death penalty or takes seriously the appellate process," Mandery said.
The decrease in executions in Texas may indicate a slow change in attitudes in the state - as well as the qualms that jurors may now have as science advances as well as reporting of wrongful convictions continue - but experts still point to racism at the root of the use of capital punishment as something that would need to be addressed in conjunction with any major changes.
"One idea is that [the use of the death penalty is] tied to the culture of lynching in the South and that the dehumanization of prisoners is an artefact of the commodification of people, and there's clearly something to that," Mandery said.
McCann echoed that - while not unique to Texas - the origin and use of the death penalty are tied to "mostly racism and corruption, but that's my personal view."
"I think the more difficult problem in every state - and this goes from Pennsylvania and Philadelphia to Houston to Los Angeles - is that we as a people don't want to acknowledge the vast problems we have in overcoming a legacy of racism that still infects the death penalty," McCann said.
As for Texas specifically, McCann said that capital punishment is "deeply ingrained in the culture here."
McCann said that while the rate of executions "may slow, I don't see it stopping, short of a national decision by someone like the Supreme Court, that we are simply incapable of doing this properly," he said.
Mandery agreed, and handicapped the odds of such a ruling happening with the current bench of justices unlikely.
"The only mechanism that would end the death penalty in Texas is Supreme Court action. Five years ago, I would have said that was unlikely but possible [that such an action be handed down]. Now it seems quite unlikely," Mandery said.
"The fate of the death penalty rests with the balance of power on the Supreme Court, and that's hanging by a thread," he said.
Source: ABC News, March 23, 2019
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