The DPIC report, “The Death Penalty in 2009: Year End Report," is in Adobe .pdf format.
"Death Sentences Dropped, but Executions Rose in '09," is John Schwartz' report for the New York Times.
More death row convicts were executed in the United States this year than last, but juries continue to grow more wary of capital punishment, according to a new 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 two-thirds from a peak of 328 in 1994, according to the report being released Friday by the Death Penalty Information Center, a research organization that opposes capital punishment.
“This entire decade has been marked by a declining use of the death penalty,” said Richard Dieter, the executive director of the group.
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.”
Mr. Wisner said that while polls showed continued general support for capital punishment, “there is a real worry by jurors of, ‘I believe in it, but what if we later find out it was someone else and it’s too late to do anything about it?’ ”
In 2005, Texas juries were given the option of sentencing defendants to life without parole.
While death sentences are in decline, executions rose in the past year, according to the new report. Fifty-two prisoners have been put to death in 2009, compared with 42 in 2007 and 37 in 2008.
The report also noted that in 2009 New Mexico became the 15th state to repeal the death penalty, in part because of budget considerations and the high cost of death penalty appeals, which Gov. Bill Richardson called “a valid reason” for eliminating the ultimate sanction “in this era of austerity and tight budgets.”
Mark Sherman writes the AP filing, "Report: Death sentences decline; death rows shrink," via Google News.
Texas and other states that lead the nation in executions are sentencing many fewer inmates to death, a trend that slowly is reducing the death row population in the United States, a report from an anti-capital punishment group says.
There were 106 death sentences imposed in 2009, the Death Penalty Information Center estimated in its annual report released Friday. That number is the smallest since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976 and compares with an annual average of 295 death sentences during the 1990s.
Fifty-two people were put to death in 11 states this year, nearly half as many executions as 10 years ago.
The center, which opposes capital punishment, attributes the drop in both executions and new death sentences to fears of executing the innocent, concerns about the high cost of the death penalty and laws that allow inmates to be sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Nine men who had been sentenced to death were exonerated and freed in 2009, the second highest-number of exonerations since the death penalty was reinstated, the report said.
Texas, which continues to far outpace other states in executions, has seen its death row population decline by more than a quarter in 10 years, mainly because of the decrease in death sentences. Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston and all by itself has put more people to death than any state other than Texas, has had no new death sentences for the past two years.
Statewide, nine people were sentenced to death in Texas in 2009, compared with 48 in 1999 and an annual average of 34 in the 1990s.
Ohio and Virginia — other states among the annual leaders in executions each year — recorded just one new death sentence each, although another Ohio inmate was resentenced to death by a three-judge panel after his sentence was twice overturned.
And:
The nationwide death row population has shrunk by nearly 10 percent in the past 10 years, but still tops 3,000.
Even in Texas, around 330 people remain on death row and the state already has scheduled six executions for 2010. Ohio, with roughly 175 inmates on death row, has six executions scheduled.
Two other states with large death row populations — California and Pennsylvania — have abandoned executions, at least temporarily.
California has roughly 690 inmates and Pennsylvania, 225.
CNN posts, "Death penalty use declining nationwide," by Supreme Court producer Bill Mears.
Fifty-two inmates were executed this year in 11 states. The last was Matthew Wrinkles on December 11 in Indiana. He was convicted of murdering his wife and two family members 15 years ago.
Late Wednesday, Georgia issued a stay of execution for Carlton Gary. Known as the "Columbus Strangler," he was convicted of murdering three women with their own stockings and was suspected of four other similar killings. He has been given more time to file further appeals.
As in previous years, Texas in 2009 led the states in executions, with 24 -- four times as many as the next-highest, Alabama. Among high-profile cases:
-- John Allen Muhammad, convicted as the so-called "Beltway Sniper," responsible for at least 10 killings in the sniper-style killings around the Washington, D.C. area and three other states in 2002. He was executed in Virginia in November.
-- Kenneth Biros, who became the first person executed in the U.S. using a single-drug lethal injection. A three-drug cocktail has been used nationwide for years by corrections officials, but no complications were reported with the new method. He was executed in Ohio on December 8.
"Number of death sentences falls to a historic low," is the title of the Washington Post article written by Robert Barnes and Maria Glod.
The trend of decreased death sentences was especially noticeable in Virginia, which is second only to Texas in the number of inmates executed. Even as the commonwealth put to death its most infamous death row inmate, Beltway sniper John Allen Muhammad, its courts were sentencing fewer murderers to death.
Virginia averaged six death sentences a year during the 1990s, according to the report by the center, which favors the abolition of capital punishment. But only one person has been sentenced to death in the commonwealth this year, according to the report, and only six others have been sent to death row in the five preceding years.
Legal experts and prosecutors in Virginia cite several factors for the decline, including Supreme Court rulings that barred the execution of juvenile offenders and the mentally retarded. They also point to a drop in violent crime, growing jury concerns about executing an innocent man, and prosecutors' concerns about the expense of pursuing a death penalty at a time of budget cuts.
"General public support for severe punishment increases when people feel less secure, and it declines when people feel more secure," said Richard J. Bonnie, a University of Virginia professor of law and psychiatry. "I have felt that people's worries about their security have been focused on terrorism rather than domestic crime."
Prince William County Commonwealth's Attorney Paul B. Ebert, who is known for his support of capital punishment, said he is seeing fewer heinous crimes. His office prosecuted four men who are currently on death row as well as two executed this year.
"The overall crime rate is dropping, and to some degree I think that's due to availability of the death penalty," Ebert said. He said most of the murders he has prosecuted recently are drug crimes or domestic killings, cases he said are less likely to result in a death sentence.
Ebert said there is also a practical reason for the decline. During a recent meeting with other prosecutors from across the state, he said several mentioned that tight budgets have discouraged them from pursuing protracted capital cases.
"They feel like they just don't have the manpower in their office to go through the long, long hearings," Ebert said.
The process ends at the Supreme Court, where the justices continue to spend a large portion of their time on death penalty appeals.
"All of these cases are going to be litigated to the hilt, and they have such a long life span that they create so many opportunities" for courts to make an error, said Douglas A. Berman, a law professor and sentencing expert at Ohio State University. "And not just error, but the kind of error that the Supreme Court has to pay attention to."
Of the nine opinions the court has handed down in the term that began in October, five concerned death penalty appeals.
In four of the cases, the court dispensed with its usual call for detailed briefings and oral arguments and summarily reversed the decisions of the lower courts. In most cases, the justices favored the prosecution.
But in one significant case, the court opened the door for military veterans to blame their crimes on post-traumatic stress disorder. Without dissent, the justices in Porter v. McCollum said a lawyer was negligent for not presenting to the jury evidence of his client's bravery during the war, even though it was 30 years after returning from Korea that he killed his former girlfriend and her new boyfriend.
This year, the court issued a rare order that a federal judge must consider the innocence claims of condemned Georgia prisoner Troy Anthony Davis, who has mounted a global campaign to declare that he was wrongfully convicted of murder and barred by federal law from presenting the evidence that would prove it.
To Berman and Elisabeth Semel, director of the death penalty clinic at the University of California at Berkeley's law school, it makes sense that the court, divided on many aspects of capital punishment, takes the chance to present a united front when it sees examples of mistakes in death penalty cases that all justices agree on.
Ashley Jones posts, "The Year in Capital Punishment: Sentences Down, Executions Up," at the Wall Street Journal Law blog.
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.
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