The Death Penatly Information Center has issued a new report, Innocence and the Crisis in the American Death Penalty, cat­a­loging 116 cas­es of for­mer death row inmates who have been exon­er­at­ed in 25 states since 1973. The report also notes that as the num­ber of inno­cent peo­ple freed from death row has risen and become more pub­lic in recent years, there has been a dra­mat­ic drop in death sen­tences around the coun­try. The num­ber of death sen­tences, which have been steadi­ly drop­ping since 1998, are now about 50% less than they were in the late 1990s. DPIC uses the objec­tive stan­dards of the jus­tice sys­tem in deter­min­ing whether a case should be includ­ed in its inno­cence list. (N.Y. Times, Sept. 15, 2004). See ​“From DPIC” on the Center’s home page; see also Innocence.

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