Too Broken to Fix: An In-Depth Look at America's Outlier Death Penalty Counties
"A new report from the Fair Punishment Project at Harvard Law School offers an in-depth look at how the death penalty is operating in the small handful of counties across the country that are still using it. Of the 3,143 county or county equivalents in the United States, only 16—or one half of one percent—imposed five or more death sentences between 2010 and 2015. Part I of the report, titled Too Broken to Fix: An In-depth Look at America’s Outlier Death Penalty Counties, examined 10 years of court opinions and records from eight of these 16 “outlier counties,” including Caddo Parish (LA), Clark (NV), Duval (FL), Harris (TX), Maricopa (AZ), Mobile (AL), Kern (CA) and Riverside (CA). The report also analyzed all of the new death sentences handed down in these counties since 2010. Click here to read the report."

View Part II
 

Elected judges reverse death penalties at less than half the rate of those who are appointed, @Reuters analysis finds http://t.co/TJrpnyqBnu

— Sentencing Project (@SentencingProj) September 23, 2015

In much of the country, the death penalty is disappearing. In the South, it lives on.

In the wake of Oklahoma’s horrifying mis-execution of Clayton Lockett, could the death penalty itself die off? It seems impossible, I know. Polls show support falling, but still at about 55 percent. And yet, that’s the death penalty in the abstract. On the ground, in many states, a different reality is playing out—one that demonstrates growing discomfort with capital punishment. 

There is one looming exception to this rule: the South. The death penalty has become largely a regional phenomenon that divides the South—or, really, parts of the South—from the rest of the country. While the death penalty remains legal in 32 states, actual death sentences and executions are concentrated in a small and shrinking number of them. The death penalty won’t be abolished throughout America anytime soon. But it could quietly fall into disuse in all but a small number of holdouts.

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America, China And Saudi Arabia Among The Few Remaining Countries That Executed Anyone In 2013

Only 22 nations that are not currently experiencing military conflicts carried out executions in 2013, according to a report by Amnesty International. Moreover, while the United States — with 39 executions in 2013 — ranks fifth overall in total executions, the death penalty is an increasingly regional affair within our nation’s borders. Only nine states, Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Oklahoma, Missouri, Texas and Virginia executed a person in 2013. Notably, Texas killed 16 of those 39 people, which is more than 40 percent of the total number of American executions.

China, which is believed to have carried out thousands of executions, is the world leader in these state-sponsored killings. Specific data regarding China’s execution rate is considered a state secret, however, so the exact number of people killed by the People’s Republic of China is uncertain.

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Report: Global executions up 15 percent in 2013

The number of known executions around the world rose almost 15 percent in 2013, and the United States was among the five countries putting the most people to death, a new report says.

The Amnesty International report released Wednesday comes shortly after a stunning decision this week by an Egyptian court to sentence to death 529 alleged supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood after a two-session trial. The London-based rights group has called the action "grotesque."

The new report said the 778 judicial executions in 22 countries the group was able to count last year don't include the thousands of people put to death in China, where such information is a state secret. China's foreign ministry referred a question about its executions last year to the justice ministry, which did not respond to phone or fax.

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Fast-track executions?

What's wrong with this picture?

Exonerations of wrongly convicted prisoners are at an all-time high. Last month, the governor of Washington put executions on hold because, since 1981, when the state last updated its capital punishment laws, a majority of the 32 death sentences that were imposed were overturned. More than a dozen other states have also called a halt to executions, for various reasons.
And yet, three former California governors — George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson and Gray Davis — are urging the state to speed up a clearly flawed process of deciding who's to die. Their approach could theoretically limit the state appeals process, which now generally takes 12 to 15 years, to five years.

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This is a LATimes op-ed.  Tom

Should a death row inmate's life hinge on an IQ test?

On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments about a Florida man, Freddie Lee Hall, who faces execution for a 1978 murder. Hall is intellectually incapable of understanding the arguments, but the state of Florida says that it has the right to execute him nevertheless, in a case that spotlights both the barbarity and the absurdity of the death penalty.

This page has a long history of opposing capital punishment on the grounds of morality, overwhelming evidence of its misapplication and public expense, among other things. But even if we did see sense in the practice, we would see none in applying the death penalty here, despite the brutality of the crime. Hall and a partner were convicted of kidnapping, raping and murdering Karol Hurst, who was 21 and pregnant; later that day, they allegedly shot and killed a deputy sheriff during a confrontation. This case centers on the Hurst murder.

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Legislators Urge Firing Squads, Electrocutions, And Gas Chamber To Thwart Delayed Executions

For some lawmakers, nothing will stop their commitment to the death penalty. International drug companies have refused to provide their drugs for U.S. executions over moral opposition. Courts have held up executions as litigation moves forward over alternative injection drugs to skirt those restrictions. And states like Ohio that are moving forward with the death penalty using a new untried drug that left an inmate gasping for 25 minutes are sure to face more legal challenges going forward.

So they have other ideas, even as the death penalty is falling out of favor nationwide. In Missouri, the state whose attorney general has already proposed the revival of gas chambers and secured court approval of secret lethal cocktail manufacturing, lawmakers are now proposing a bill to bring back firing squads. Wyoming is also floating a firing squads measure, the Wall Street Journal Law Blog reports. And a Virginia bill that would bring back electrocution passed the Virginia House this week. Virginia is one of several states that now permit death by electric chair only by inmate request.

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New Execution Methods Can’t Disguise Same Old Death Penalty Problems

Ohio made history today by becoming the first state to use the two-drug combination of midazolam and hydromorphone in the execution of Dennis McGuire. State officials decided to use this experimental combination of powerful sedatives and painkillers after supplies of approved execution drugs ran dry. These shortages have caused other states to begin using experimental and downright dangerous methods to carry out executions.

One of the most popular alternatives has been for states to seek out drugs from compounding pharmacies. These drugs are made to order and have no accountability measures or oversight from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ensure the drugs work as they are intended. The result—some, if not all, batches of drugs from compounding pharmacies may be ineffective and would not have passed traditional FDA approval. This greatly increases the risk that the condemned will experience torturous pain while they are executed. Even those who may strongly agree with the death penalty must admit that conducting state business in secret without accountability is no way for government to run. Even if execution itself has not (yet) been found a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s ban on “cruel” and unusual punishment, certainly a torturous death using experimental drug combinations is.

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In 2013, Death Penalty Rarely Doled Out To Those Whose Crimes Include Minority Victims

Of the 39 executions performed in 2013, the overwhelming majority involved a crime with a white victim. The statistics from the Death Penalty Information Center show the continued racial bias of death penalty imposition, even as it becomes a decreasingly common punishment. While 32 of the 39 executions involved a white victim, just one white person was executed for killing only a black man. This defendant, Robert Gleason, was one of just four people who “volunteered” to be executed by waiving his appeals. Here’s how it breaks down:

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Delbert Tibbs, Who Left Death Row and Fought Against It, Dies at 74

It is not easy:

you stand waiting for a train

or a bus that may never come

no friend drives by to catch a ride

cold, tired:

call yourself a poet

but work all day mopping floors and looking out for thieves.

Those lines, describing the experience of an innocent man on death row, are from a poem by Delbert Tibbs, who in 1974 was convicted in Florida of a rape and a murder that he had nothing to do with, it was later found. He spent nearly three years in prison before the State Supreme Court reversed his convictions, vacated his death sentence and freed him. 

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Jimmy Carter: Ban the Death Penalty

US Supreme Court should rule death penalty is 'cruel and unusual punishment,' said former president

 The death penalty is a form of legalized "cruel and unusual punishment" and should be banned across the entirety of the U.S., former president Jimmy Carter urged in a Guardian interview published on Monday.

"It’s time for the Supreme Court to look at the totality of the death penalty once again,” said Carter. “My preference would be for the court to rule that it is cruel and unusual punishment, which would make it prohibitive under the U.S. constitution.”

Carter's sentiment is shared by an increasing number of Americans. As recent polling has shown, support for the death penalty in the U.S. has fallen to its lowest rate in more than four decades. While a majority still approves of the measure, support has fallen from 80% in 1994 to roughly 60% today.
Currently, 32 U.S. states still allow the death penalty. However, as The Guardian notes, the majority of the 1,352 executions since 1976 took place in 2% of the counties in the nation

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2 Percent Of Counties Perform Majority of U.S. Executions

Just two percent of U.S. counties have been responsible for a majority of executions since the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a death penalty moratorium in 1976. And about two percent of U.S. counties house the majority of current death row inmates, according to a new report by the Death Penalty Information Center.

The findings add to the body of evidence that suggest the death penalty is applied arbitrarily, with factors such as location and race having more bearing on a death sentence than the severity of the crime.

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Graphic: A Short History of U.S. Capital Punishment

More than 15,000 people have been executed in the United States going back to colonial times. Witches, slaves, pirates and murderers have all been executed by a variety of methods, including gibbeting and being pressed to death. Of late, it is murderers being executed, most commonly by lethal injection. Texas is the state that has used capital punishment the most since 1976.
The National Post takes a look at the history and demographics of the United States’ death penalty.

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Missouri Attorney General Calls For Revival Of Gas Chambers

Intent on moving forward with scheduled executions at any price, Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster said this week he would resort to the gas chamber while other methods are tied up in court battle.
Koster’s comments are the latest move to push forward executions, as litigation over the humanity of lethal injections using the anesthetic propofol continues. Koster dismissed concerns over the cruelty of reviving the gas chamber in an exchange with The Associated Press, saying, “The premeditated murder of an innocent Missourian is cruel and unusual punishment. The lawful implementation of the death penalty, following a fair and reasoned jury trial, is not.”
Missouri stopped using the gas chamber in 1965 and shut down its last prison containing a gas chamber decades ago, according to AP. California’s use of the gas chamber was deemed cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment by one federal appeals court in 1996.

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In Colorado, Blacks Make Up 4 Percent Of The Population And 100 Percent Of Death Row

In March, Colorado came close to becoming the 19th state to abolish the death penalty, but the bill failed after Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) voiced opposition and suggested a possible veto. A few months later, Colorado’s death penalty is still firmly in place, and the state is poised to complete what would be only the second execution in 45 years (the last was in 1997). Few dispute that Nathan Dunlap committed a horrific crime and murdered several people at a Chuck E. Cheese. But judges, university professors, and other prominent state leaders are urging Gov. Hickenlooper to commute Dunlap’s sentence, both because crucial errors that defined his trial may have led him to get a harsher sentence than others, and because killing anyone under the perverted state system would be a miscarriage of justice. According to letters filed with Hickenlooper’s office:

• All three people on death row are black men. In a state that is only 4.3% African American, Colorado’s death row is 100% African American.
• All three men on death are from the same one county, out of Colorado’s 64.
• All three men committed their crime when they were under the age of 21.

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Racism in a Texas Death Case

In the annals of racism in the Texas criminal justice system, seven death penalty cases are in a class by themselves. In 2000, after the Supreme Court ordered a new sentencing hearing in one of them, Senator John Cornyn, who was then the state attorney general, called for new sentencing hearings in the other cases for the same reason: because race was improperly and explicitly considered as a factor in determining the sentence.

Duane Buck, who was convicted of two murders, is the only one among the defendants who was not granted a new sentencing hearing. His post-conviction lawyers have uncovered a lot of mitigating evidence that his trial counsel did not present to the jury that sentenced him to death. He is seeking life without parole and is awaiting a decision on this matter by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. 

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This is from a NYTimes editorial. Tom

13 Men Condemned to Die Despite Severe Mental Illness

If juveniles and intellectually disabled people are ineligible for execution, why not paranoid schizophrenics? 

Just how crazy must a person be to be ruled incompetent for execution in the United States? Being profoundly mentally ill is not enough. You have to be deemed legally "insane."

At trial, the insanity defense generally hinges on a person's inability to distinguish right from wrong or understand the "nature and quality" of his act. In the context of an impending execution, insanity means you cannot rationally comprehend that you are being put to death as a consequence of the crime you committed.

In 2005, a Texas jury found that Andre Thomas, the subject of my in-depth companion piece (see box below), was not insane at the time of his crime.

To put this in context, consider that Thomas was then, and still is, a delusional paranoid schizophrenic who hears voices—from God, he believes—telling him to do things. He carved out the organs of his four-year-old son, his estranged wife, and her 13-month-old daughter, and took them home in his pockets, believing that this would kill the demons inside them. In the days following his arrest, he insisted to a jailhouse nurse that his victims were still alive.

And that's not even the weirdest part of the story.

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A Lynching Map of the United States, 1900-1931

This map, compiled using data gathered by the Tuskegee Institute, represents the geographic distribution of lynchings during some of the years when the crime was most widespread in the United States. Tuskegee began keeping lynching records under the direction of Booker T. Washington, who was the institute's founding leader.

In 1959, Tuskegee defined its parameters for pronouncing a murder a “lynching”: “There must be legal evidence that a person was killed. That person must have met death illegally. A group of three or more persons must have participated in the killing. The group must have acted under the pretext of service to justice, race or tradition.”

In 1900-1931, Georgia led the lynching tally, with Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, and Arkansas rounding out the top seven worst offenders.

These numbers can seem antiseptic. Upon the release of the Tuskegee Report in 1916, the Cleveland Plain Dealer sought to put a face to the statistics by describing the relatively minor crimes that provoked some of the year's lynchings (while noting that at least four of the people killed were later proved innocent):

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After Failed Death Penalty Repeal, California Could See Spate of Executions

In the California county that houses the nation's largest death row, voters overwhelmingly endorsed an end to executions on Tuesday. But Proposition 34, which would have repealed the death penalty and replaced it with life without parole (LWOP), was rejected statewide by a 53–47 percent margin. The measure drew fire from sentencing reform advocates concerned with embracing LWOP, sometimes called “the other death penalty.” But now that Prop. 34 has failed, the Golden State could see a wave of executions. 

More than 700 prisoners await execution at San Quentin State Prison. But none have been carried out since 2006, when a federal judge ruled that the state's three-drug lethal injection procedure could put prisoners in agonizing pain if administered incorrectly. Though the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation began overhauling its procedures in response, the new protocols have remained in limbo in state courts.

But next week, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reports, San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe will attempt to bypass the de facto moratorium by asking a judge to allow the execution of Robert Fairbank, who has exhausted his state and federal appeals, with a single lethal drug. Six states currently use such a procecure, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. If the judge grants this request, executions could proceed at an unprecented pace—California has 13 other inmates who have run out their appeals process. 

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