EDITORIALS: Major Papers Around the Country Tracked DPIC’s Year End Report

The information and analysis in DPIC’s recent 2010 Year-End Report were reported in hundreds of media outlets around the country. Among the papers writing editorials on the trends cited in the report were the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Colorado’s Aurora Sentinel. The Times’ editorial, “Still Cruel, Less Usual,” noted, “A report released this month by the Death Penalty Information Center counted 46 executions in 2010. That is nearly 12 percent fewer than a year ago, and down sharply from the 85 executions of 2000… . The center suggested a number of reasons for the decline, including that prosecutors and the public are grappling with the wrenching problem of innocence. The irreversible punishment of death requires a foolproof justice system, but growing numbers of DNA exonerations in recent years suggest that it is far from that.” The Post’s editorial, “46 Executions Too Many,” also cited the costs of capital cases as a significant concern: “Litigating a capital case is expensive - on average $3 million, according to the [D]eath [P]enalty [Information] [C]enter - and exceeds the costs of imprisoning an inmate for decades.” The Sentinel’s editorial, “Time to Rid Colorado of Death Penatly,” cited some of the same statistics and trends and urged the state legislature to end capital punishment: “Colorado state lawmakers will almost certainly ponder a bill next year that would end the death penalty here. Fellow legislators should give that measure serious consideration, perhaps asking voters whether to end the practice and allow the state to join the rest of the civilized world.” Read full editorials below.

New York Times
Still Cruel, Less Usual
December 31, 2010

The tide continued ebbing on the death penalty this year. States are putting fewer people to death, and juries continue to favor the punishment of life without parole over execution when given the choice. A report released this month by the Death Penalty Information Center counted 46 executions in 2010. That is nearly 12 percent fewer than a year ago, and down sharply from the 85 executions of 2000.

Forty-six state-committed killings are 46 too many, but the drop was even felt in Texas, by far the national leader in executions. It killed 17 prisoners this year, 29 percent fewer than last year. The center, which opposes the death penalty, found that while juries imposed about the same number of death sentences this year as last — 114 in 2010, 112 in 2009 — that rate was still only about half what it was in the 1990s.

The center suggested a number of reasons for the decline, including that prosecutors and the public are grappling with the wrenching problem of innocence. The irreversible punishment of death requires a foolproof justice system, but growing numbers of DNA exonerations in recent years suggest that it is far from that.

What tempers the results is that some of the reluctance had nothing to do with enlightenment. Death rows and executions are expensive, and cash-strapped states seem more willing to investigate alternatives. And executions were postponed or canceled this year in Arkansas, California, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Kentucky simply because of a shortage of a lethal-injection drug.

Still there was good news in 2010. Electoral victories by candidates who oppose the death penalty, like the new governors of California and New York and the re-elected governor of Massachusetts, suggest that it’s not a voters’ litmus test or political third rail.

A judge in a state court in Texas, of all places, granted a hearing this month on whether the state’s capital-punishment law is unconstitutional because of the high risk of executing the innocent. While the hearing has been temporarily halted, prominent former governors, prosecutors and legislators have urged that it continue. And in an essay this month in The New York Review of Books, John Paul Stevens, the retired Supreme Court justice, argued that capital punishment was neither fair nor an effective deterrent.

We can only hope the country is closer to putting its shameful experiment in state-sponsored death behind it.

(“Still Cruel, Less Usual,” New York Times, December 31, 2010).

The Washington Post
46 executions too many
Monday, December 27, 2010; A14

THERE IS REASON for hope when no new death sentences are imposed in death penalty states, as happened in Virginia and Georgia in 2010. Also heartening are drops in the number of executions in places such as Texas, which has long been the nation’s leader in capital punishment but put to death seven fewer inmates this year than in 2009.

The downward trend is welcome. We hope that it is heading toward abolition. Only then will there be certainty that the state has not put innocents to death.

Nationwide, the number of executions fell from 52 in 2009 to 46 in 2010, according to a report by the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit organization that studies capital punishment. Texas was responsible for 17, more than twice as many as any other state; Virginia, whose 108 executions since 1976 are second only to Texas, carried out three executions.

The report reaffirms the trend away from capital punishment. The number of death sentences has fallen by almost 50 percent since 2000, when 224 inmates were sentenced to death. In 2010, 114 death sentences were imposed. Although 35 states allow capital punishment, only 12 carried out executions this year.

The nation’s growing skepticism over capital punishment is fueled by several factors. Juries appear less willing to impose death sentences when given the choice of imposing a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. Most death penalty states offer this option, including Texas, which passed such a law in 2005. Litigating a capital case is expensive - on average $3 million, according to the death penalty center - and exceeds the costs of imprisoning an inmate for decades.

Most important, there is the concern over possibly putting an innocent person to death. Since 1973, some 130 death row inmates have been exonerated, largely through the use of DNA evidence. Yet not every state allows death row inmates access to such testing.

Some states, most recently New Mexico and New Jersey, have abolished the death penalty. Maryland, which has five inmates on its death row and has carried out only five executions since 1976, came tantalizingly close in 2009. State lawmakers should renew the effort when they reconvene in 2011.

(“46 Executions Too Many,” The Washington Post, December 27, 2010).

After decades of increasingly disturbing news about the death penalty in the United States, finally a spot of hope.

The number of executions dropped 12 percent this year, according to an Associated Press story, taking the rate of death sentences to historic lows.

There’s a host of factors contributing to the drop in executions, but some of the reasons are obvious. Juries are increasingly loathe to hand out the death penalty because of the rash of cases where sloppy, negligent and in some cases corrupt prosecutions have put the wrong guy behind bars.

In Texas alone there have been 12 exonerations of death-row inmates since 1978, freeing men who were wrongfully convicted. Probably one of the biggest reasons for the rate of executions has been news about the exorbitant cost of keeping prisoners on death row for years, and sometimes decades.

In Colorado, taxpayers shell out about $1 million a year to keep two or three inmates on death row.

Another factor in turning Americans against the death penalty are the stomach-turning stories about having to dig for veins in the arms of prisoners for hours to inject them with lethal drugs, or the drugs not working, or in one case, an IV coming undone and having to postpone the execution so it could all be started again.

It’s time to end the barbaric practice here in Colorado.

The United Nations and others have studied the issue relentlessly during the past four decades. The studies show that countries that execute criminals don’t have any better capital crime rate than those who lock up the criminals for good. And the near-daily executions in Texas certainly don’t keep residents there from killing each other.

In fact, lining them up on death row puts us in sorry company with Iran, Iraq, China, North Korea and Syria.

Colorado and the United States is little better.

We are considered barbaric monsters by people in Canada, Germany, England and all of Europe, Australia, South Africa, and even places such as Macedonia, Venezuela and Colombia. Those are countries that once imposed the death penalty but realized that it only makes for revenge, not justice, and that it’s all too easy to kill innocent people.

Colorado state lawmakers will almost certainly ponder a bill next year that would end the death penalty here. Fellow legislators should give that measure serious consideration, perhaps asking voters whether to end the practice and allow the state to join the rest of the civilized world.

(“Time to Rid Colorado of Death Penalty,” Aurora Sentinel (editorial), Dec. 21, 2010). Read more Editorials on the death penalty.