Death row’s population declined for the 17th straight year in 2017, while the duration from sentence to execution increased to 20 years, three months, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reported Tuesday, continuing an overall drop in capital punishment across the U.S.
The number of inmates under sentence of death fell by 94 to 2,703, a figure that would shrink further if it excluded more than 900 condemned prisoners in Colorado, Oregon, Pennsylvania and, as of March, California, which have declared moratoriums on executions. An additional 59 federal inmates were on death row, up by one over 2016.
The 23 executions in 2017 were half the number in 2010, although slightly more than the 20 carried out in 2016. Only 8 of the 32 states with capital punishment conducted executions in 2017; in May, New Hampshire abolished its death penalty.
Even though the 34 new death sentences imposed in 2017 outnumbered the 23 executions, an additional 105 inmates left death row for other reasons. 21 died of natural causes, the bureau reported, 2 died by suicide and 1 died in a traffic accident.
The data confirm that imposition of the death penalty is concentrated in a handful of states. Texas executed 7 inmates in 2017, followed by Arkansas with 4 and Alabama and Florida with 3 apiece.
“Texas is still the big driver of all the execution activity, because Texas is the one state that puts a lot of people on death row and actually executes them,” said Lee Kovarsky, a law professor at the University of Maryland.
Capital cases tend to be concentrated in larger counties in states with the death penalty, Mr. Kovarsky said. “You need a well-heeled county,” he said, because “it’s gotten so expensive to produce a death sentence and also to convert a death sentence into an execution.”
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority, reinforced by last year’s appointment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, has expressed increasing frustration with procedural tactics inmates employ to delay their executions, as well as abolitionist campaigns that led drugmakers to restrict the use of their products to end an inmate’s life.
“The Constitution allows capital punishment,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the court in April, rejecting an inmate’s claim that a lethal-injection protocol put him at risk of excruciating pain. Over the liberal justices’ dissent, he complained of “pleading games” inmates could try to delay their executions, and observed that “pressure from anti-death-penalty advocates induced the company that manufactured sodium thiopental to stop supplying it for use in executions. As a result, the State was unable to proceed with executions,” further delaying just punishment.
The span between sentence and execution grew by 3 years, 3 months over 2016—and 7 years, 6 months from 2007.
Dissenting from the Gorsuch opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer called attention to such delays.
“It may be that there is no way to execute a prisoner quickly while affording him the protections that our Constitution guarantees,” he wrote.
Source: Wall Street Journal, Jess Bravin, July 23, 2019
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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
