Sentencing

A growing backlog of death penalty cases and delays in starting trials in Arizona’s Maricopa County has forced Superior Court judges to apply pressure on both sides by refusing to postpone trial dates and demanding that attorneys discuss settlements. The backlog came as a result of County Attorney Andrew Thomas’s aggressive pursuit of death sentences in more than 120 cases since taking office in 2005. The number of death penalty defendants grew faster than the courts could handle them. Over 100 death penalty defendants are still awaiting trial in Maricopa County, most of whom are beyond the 18-month time period in which they are supposed to be tried.  “I think firm trial dates settle cases,” said Presiding Criminal Judge Gary Donahoe.  The pressure is apparently working. This year, Thomas has allowed 27 defendants who faced the death penalty to plead to life sentences or less – nearly twice as many as last year, and eight times as many as in the year Thomas first took office. There is a schedule to try to settle more than 20 cases before the end of 2009. Thomas has also filed fewer notices of intent to seek the death penalty.

Jefferson Parish near New Orleans has sent 28 people to death row since the death penalty was reinstated in 1975, many of them under the current District Attorney, Paul Connick Jr., who took office in 1997.  But no one has been sentenced to death in that parish in the past 5 years and prosecutors haven't even tried a capital case in the past 4 years, despite a number of high-profile murders.  This decrease in death sentencing is not unique to Louisiana.  "The trend in these numbers, as across the country, reflects the emerging view that life without parole is an incredibly serious punishment and that juries, prosecutors, the public and family members of victims are increasingly preferring the certainty of a life sentence over the confusion and delays, multiple retrials and high error rates that are inherent in capital cases," said Jelpi Picou, executive director of the Capital Appeals Project in New Orleans.  The last execution resulting from a case from Jefferson Parish was in 1993 and half of those sentenced from the parish have had their death sentences reversed.

Indiana is sentencing fewer people to death and executing at its slowest pace in 15 years.  It has gone two years without an execution for the first time since the mid-1990’s. "We're running out of death row inmates," said Clark County Prosecutor Steven Stewart, who maintains a pro-death penalty Web site.  Prosecutors attribute the decline to time and money issues, part of a national trend that has prompted several states to move towards abolishing the death penalty.  Vanderburgh County Prosecutor Stan Levco said he has more reservations about seeking the death penalty than he did 15 years ago due to the rising costs. "There's more than a few small counties that have filed death penalty cases who after they've gone through it for a while have just thrown up their hands and have said, 'I give."'  While most officials expect executions to resume, Indiana defense attorney Alan Freedman finds the two-year absence of executions to be a sign of things to come, saying, "The death penalty in Indiana will become an oddity."

By the numbers in Nebraska:

205 Nebraska murder cases have been eligible for the death penalty since 1973.

31 of those resulted in death sentences.

3 resulted in executions.

4 death-row occupants died in prison.

10 men now sit on death row. Death sentence was overturned in the rest.

[source: 2007 study by Jerry Soucie of the Nebraska Commission on Public Advocacy]

("Death penalty pits costs vs. closure," May 3, 2009, Omaha World-Herald)

Compared to the 1990’s, there has been a marked decline in death sentences in the U.S. since 2000. Every region of the country and every state that averaged one or more death sentences per year have seen a decline in the annual number of death sentences. The chart below compares the annual number of death sentences in each state in the 1990s with the 2000s. North Carolina, California, Florida, and Texas experienced the greatest declines in sentencing.  This issue and others are addressed in the Death Penalty Information Center’s Year End Report, released December 11, 2008.