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EDITORIALS: Newspapers Stress Findings from DPIC’s 2015 Year End Report

By Death Penalty Information Center

Posted on Jan 04, 2016 | Updated on Sep 25, 2024

Several newspapers across the country featured themes from DPIC’s 2015 Year End Report in editorials and opinion pieces at the end of December:

“Once broadly accepted, capital punishment is increasingly a fringe practice. A handful of states conduct nearly all executions. Four — Texas, Missouri, Georgia and Florida — carried out 93 percent of them in 2015. Sixty-three percent of new death sentences came from a mere 2 percent of U.S. counties, a group with a history of disproportionately using the death penalty.Bad policy encourages this sort of excess: Three states — Alabama, Delaware and Florida — do not require juries to be unanimous when recommending a death sentence. A quarter of new sentences came from split juries in these states.”

“Not only did executions drop in 2015, but the number of people sentenced to death also hit an historic low, the center said. That could be due to a growing skepticism by jurors of a system susceptible to manipulation through coerced testimony or other misconduct…— or there could be some other reason for a decline in convictions on capital punishment charges…What is clear is that there’s no correcting an execution if later evidence shows the prosecution was wrong…Abolition is the direction of the future, and the U.S. should join.”

“[T]he fact that new death sentences were at an all-time low in Texas this year is reason to applaud…Texas’ declines mirror numbers across the nation. According to the Death Penalty Information Center’s year-end report, death sentences dropped 33 percent from 2014, with 49 people being sentenced to death this year. Just six states carried out executions, the fewest since 1998…Confidence in the system’s integrity is waning. It should only follow that support for the death penalty follows suit.”
“In 2015, in fact, otherwise proudly liberal California led the nation in death sentences with 14, even as the national number dropped to 49, the fewest since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Of California’s death sentences, eight were in Riverside County (including five of the eight Latinos sentenced to death nationwide), plus three in Los Angeles and one in Orange…If we’re going to have the death penalty, shouldn’t it be at least somewhat consistent across the state?”

“As Florida becomes more isolated in its administration of the death penalty, the state is getting deserved scrutiny for problems with the practice. A year-end report from the Washington, D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center found just three states — Alabama, California and Florida — accounted for more than half of the nation’s new death sentences in 2015. More than a quarter of this year’s death sentences were imposed by Florida and Alabama after non-unanimous jury recommendations of death — a practice allowed in just those two states and Delaware. …As Florida officials have pushed to speed up the pace of executions, the Death Penalty Information Center found the rest of the country is heading in the opposite direction. A dozen states haven’t executed anyone in at least nine years, while 18 states and the District of Columbia have outlawed the death penalty altogether. … As most other states move away from the death penalty, it is long past time for Florida to follow their lead.”

“A Reading Eagle investigation in October found nearly one in five Pennsylvania inmates sentenced to death the past decade were represented by attorneys disciplined for professional misconduct at some point in their careers. And the majority of these disciplined attorneys had been found by Pennsylvania courts to be ineffective in at least one capital case. More than 150 inmates sentenced to death in the U.S. have been exonerated since 1973, according to data compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington. Sooner or later an innocent person will be executed, if it hasn’t happened already…It is time to end the death penalty in Pennsylvania.” (This editorial announced the end of the Eagle’s prior position supporting the death penalty under limited circumstances.)


Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/foon-rhee/article52327625.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/foon-rhee/article52327625.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/foon-rhee/article52327625.html#storylink=cpy..
(Editorial, “The death penalty’s demise can’t come soon enough,” The Washington Post, December 30, 2015; Editorial, “The shame of state-sponsored killing,” The Los Angeles Times, December 22, 2015; Editorial, “Editorial: Could Texas be losing its appetite for the death penalty?,” The Dallas Morning News, December 30, 2015; F. Rhee, “A deadly disparity in justice,” The Sacramento Bee, December 30, 2015; Editorial, “Editorial: Florida is out of step with executions,” The Gainesville Sun, December 31, 2015; Editorial, “Editorial: It is time to abolish the death penalty in Pennsylvania,” The Reading Eagle, December 17, 2015.) See Editorials and DPIC’s 2015 Year End Report.
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