Legal News

The Year in Capital Punishment: Sentences Down, Executions Up

By Ashby Jones

For death-penalty followers, there’s a mixed-bag of news out Friday, courtesy of a report by the Death Penalty Information Center, a research organization that opposes capital punishment.

The news is this: While more death row convicts were executed in the United States this year than last, juries are growing leerier of imposing the death penalty. Click here for the NYT article on the report; here for the Washington Post story; here to access the report.

According to the report, death sentences handed down by judges and juries in 2009 continued a trend of decline for seven years in a row, with 106 projected for the year. That level is down significantly from a peak of 328 in 1994.

The sentencing drop was most striking in Texas, which averaged 34 death sentences a year in the 1990s and had 9 this year. Vic Wisner, a former assistant district attorney in Houston, said a "constant media drumbeat" about suspect convictions and exonerations "has really changed the attitude of jurors."

The WaPo article focuses on Virginia, which averaged six death sentences a year during the 1990s, but sentenced only one person has been sentenced to death in 2009. Only six others have been sent to death row in the five preceding years.

Kent Scheidegger, the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which supports capital punishment, argued that the decline in death sentences also corresponded to a decline in the murder rate.

At the same time, according to the report, executions rose in the past year. Fifty-two prisoners have been put to death in 2009, compared with 42 in 2007 and 37 in 2008.

How to explain the rise? Ohio State law professor Douglas Berman, who authors the popular Sentencing Law and Policy blog, suggested that the rise in executions was due to last year's relatively low number, as states grappled with the implications of a major 2008 Supreme Court decision on lethal injection.

In that case, Baze v. Rees, the court ended what amounted to a moratorium of several months, beginning in 2007, on lethal injection executions by proclaiming that the procedure used in Kentucky and other states was constitutional.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 18, 2009 (boomark / email).