The Gallup crime survey, administered in the midst of the midterm elections while the capital trial for the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida was underway, found that support for capital punishment remained within one percentage point of the half-century lows recorded in 2020 and 2021. The 20 new death sentences imposed in 2022 are fewer than in any year before the pandemic, and just 2 higher than the record lows of the prior two years. With the exception of the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, the 18 executions in 2022 are the fewest since 1991.
One by one, states continued their movement away from the death penalty. On December 13, 2022, Oregon Governor Kate Brown announced the commutation of the capital sentences of all 17 death-row prisoners and instructed corrections officials to begin dismantling the state’s execution chamber. The commutations completed what she called the “near abolition” of the death penalty by the state legislature in 2019. Thirty-seven states — nearly three-quarters of the country — have now abolished the death penalty or not carried out an execution in more than a decade.
For the eighth consecutive year, fewer than 30 people were executed and fewer than 50 people were sentenced to death. The five-year average of new death sentences, 26.6 per year, is the lowest in 50 years. The five-year average of executions, 18.6 per year, is the lowest in more than 30 years, a 74% decline over the course of one decade. Death row declined in size for the 21st consecutive year, even before Governor Brown commuted the sentences of the 17 prisoners on Oregon’s death row.
2022 could be called “the year of the botched execution” because of the high number of states with failed or bungled executions. Seven of the 20 execution attempts were visibly problematic — an astonishing 35% — as a result of executioner incompetence, failures to follow protocols, or defects in the protocols themselves. On July 28, 2022, executioners in Alabama took three hours to set an IV line before putting Joe James Jr. to death, the longest botched lethal injection execution in U.S. history. Executions were put on hold in Alabama, Tennessee, Idaho, and South Carolina when the states were unable to follow execution protocols. Idaho scheduled an execution without the drugs to carry it out. One execution did not occur in Oklahoma because the state did not have custody of the prisoner and had not made arrangements for his transfer before scheduling him to be put to death.
Although states persisted in veiling the execution process in secrecy, what reporters were able to see, and what autopsies or failed executions revealed, was shocking. Witnesses reported significant problems in all three of Arizona’s executions, including the “surreal” spectacle of a possibly innocent man assisting his executioners in finding a vein in which to inject the lethal chemicals. An independent autopsy of Alabama prisoner Joe James Jr.’s body revealed what a reporter who observed those proceedings described as “carnage.” The next two executions were called off while in progress because of the execution teams inability to set an IV line. Alabama Governor Kay Ivey called for a pause in future executions and ordered an internal “top-to-bottom review” of the state’s execution process.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee stayed the execution of Oscar Smith when, shortly before it was set to occur, he learned that the execution team had failed to test the chemicals for impurities and contamination. Citing an “oversight” in execution preparations, he canceled all pending executions and commissioned a former federal prosecutor to undertake an independent review of the process.
South Carolina attempted to schedule two executions without having a complete execution protocol in place. Under state law, if lethal injection is unavailable, prisoners are forced to choose between electrocution or firing squad, but the state had no plan for firing squad executions. The state supreme court halted later scheduled executions to allow a trial court to adjudicate a challenge to the constitutionality of those methods. After a trial on the issue, the court ruled that they violated South Carolina’s constitutional prohibition against “cruel, unusual, and corporal punishments.”
A small number of jurisdictions that have historically been the heaviest users of capital punishment carried out a majority of executions and imposed most death sentences. Executions were concentrated in a handful of states – Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, and Arizona – that have historically been among the most prolific executioners. But in most states and counties, cultural and political trends toward criminal legal reform and racial justice kept the death penalty out of favor, even as media and politicians escalated fears of crime. In the midst of political rhetoric reminiscent of the peak death penalty years of the 1990s, voters selected governors in the three states with moratoria on executions. Candidates who said they would not sign death warrants won in all three. Reform prosecutors were elected or re-elected across the country: in Dallas and San Antonio, Texas; Shelby County, Tennessee; Oklahoma County, Oklahoma; and Alameda County, California; among others.
The 18 executions carried out this year raised serious concerns about the application of the death penalty and the methods used to carry it out. Among those executed this year were prisoners with serious mental illness, brain damage, intellectual disability, and strong claims of innocence. In most jurisdictions, these cases would not even be capitally prosecuted today. Two prisoners were executed over the objections of the victims’ families, and two others were executed despite requests from prosecutors to withdraw their death warrants.
The arbitrariness of capital punishment was evident in sentencing decisions. Twenty people were sentenced to death in twelve states. Among those sentenced to death were at least four with significant trauma, one with brain damage, one who waived his right to counsel, and one who waived jury sentencing and asked for a death sentence. At the same time, several highly aggravated murder cases resulted in life sentences, including the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida and a high-profile quadruple-murder in Ohio. The juxtaposition of those cases that resulted in death sentences and those that resulted in life without parole belies the myth that the death penalty is reserved for the “worst of the worst.”
Innocence cases attracted national attention and support from unlikely actors. A bipartisan group of Oklahoma legislators released the findings of an independent investigation into the case of Richard Glossip. Representative Kevin McDugle, a Republican and self-described supporter of capital punishment, was so convinced by the evidence of Glossip’s innocence that he vowed, “If we put Richard Glossip to death I will fight in this state to abolish the death penalty simply because the process is not pure. I do believe in the death penalty, I believe it needs to be there, but the process to take someone to death has to be of the highest integrity.” The Texas case of Melissa Lucio similarly brought together a bipartisan group of legislators in support of clemency. Both Glossip and Lucio remain on death row; Glossip’s execution was delayed until 2023 by Governor Kevin Stitt, while Lucio’s was delayed indefinitely by a ruling from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
Two people – Samuel Randolph IV in Pennsylvania and Marilyn Mulero in Illinois – were exonerated, and DPIC’s research found two additional older exonerations, bringing the total to 190 people exonerated from death row since 1973. DPIC released its Death Penalty Census, which analyzed the status of more than 9,700 death sentences imposed from 1972 to January 1, 2021. The data reveal that the single most likely outcome of a death sentence imposed in the United States is that the sentence or conviction is ultimately overturned and not re-imposed. Nearly half of the sentences (49.9%) were reversed as a result of court decisions. By comparison, fewer than one in six (15.7%) death sentences ended in execution. DPIC’s ongoing prosecutorial accountability project identified more than 550 trials in which capital convictions or death sentences were overturned or wrongfully convicted death-row prisoners exonerated as a result of prosecutorial misconduct — more than 5.6% of all death sentences imposed in the past fifty years.
As the United States marked 50 years of the modern death penalty system, the arbitrariness and unreliability that led the Furman court to strike down capital punishment persist. As the systemic flaws of the death penalty have become clearer and more pronounced, it is being regularly employed by just a handful of outlier jurisdictions that pursue death sentences and executions with little regard for human rights concerns, transparency, fairness, or even their own ability to successfully carry it out.
👉 Click here to read/download the full report (pdf)
Source: Death Penalty Information Center, Staff, December 16, 2023
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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
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde