The AFP recent­ly exam­ined the time an inmate spends on death row between sen­tenc­ing and exe­cu­tion and ques­tioned if inmates are being pun­ished twice with long-term impris­on­ment and exe­cu­tion. They found an aver­age inmate spends 13 years on death row, with some spend­ing 30 years or more. Craig Haney, pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy at the University of California, Santa Cruz and expert on pris­on­ers held in iso­la­tion, said, ​“People on death row live under the threat of death, which is of course an extra­or­di­nary psy­cho­log­i­cal trau­ma, and they are denied most of the ways that peo­ple make life in prison more tol­er­a­ble: mean­ing­ful social activ­i­ty, pro­gram­ming of any kind, activ­i­ties.” U.S. Supreme Court Justice John-Paul Stevens, in a case involv­ing a pris­on­er who had spent 29 years on death row, wrote, ​“The delay itself sub­jects death row inmates to decades of espe­cial­ly severe dehu­man­iz­ing con­di­tions of confinement.”

(L. Maladain, ​“For US death row inmates, a long wait for exe­cu­tion,” AFP, April 18, 2010). See also Death Row and U.S. Supreme Court.

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