(Click to enlarge) According to a report by the Christian Science Monitor, Duval County, Florida, has the high­est per capi­ta rate for inmates on death row of any U.S. coun­ty. Duval has sen­tenced one per­son to death for every 14,000 res­i­dents. It is among the 2% of coun­ties in the U.S. repon­si­ble for a major­i­ty of all inmates on death row as of 2013, as described in DPIC’s report, The 2% Death Penalty. Duval County ranked 8th, with 60 inmates on death row. Duval has hand­ed down 14 death sen­tences in the last 5 years. As a s state, Florida had the sec­ond high­est num­ber of death sen­tences in 2013, behind only California. Florida’s unusu­al sen­tenc­ing pro­ce­dures, which allow a sim­ple major­i­ty of the jury to rec­om­mend a death sen­tence, may explain some of Duval’s high sen­tenc­ing num­bers, but experts also point to cul­tur­al fac­tors. Seth Kotch, a his­to­ri­an from the University of North Carolina, said, ​“We know that the best pre­dic­tor of exe­cu­tion is pre­vi­ous exe­cu­tion, which sug­gests that a cour­t­house or a coun­ty can get into a habit of doing things, and those habit­u­al behav­iors are informed by cul­tur­al cues about crime and punishment.”

(P. Jonsson, ​“The view from the US coun­ty where death penal­ty invoked the most, per capi­ta,” Christian Science Monitor, November 29, 2014). See Arbitrariness. Read DPIC’s report, ​“The 2% Death Penalty: How a Minority of Counties Produce Most Death Cases at Enormous Costs to All” (2013).

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