In 1989, William Henry Bell, Jr. was convicted of murdering an elementary school principal. Nearly 30 years later, South Carolina’s Free Times reports that the reversal of his death sentence because of intellectual disability provides evidence of the death penalty’s continuing decline in the state and across the country. At the time of the murder, Bell maintained that he was innocent, but after four days in jail, he confessed to the murder. Prior appeals—including one alleging a pattern of racially discriminatory charging practices in interracial crimes involving black defendants and white victims—failed for 25 years, until a trial judge in November 2016 determined that Bell was ineligible for capital punishment because he had Intellectual Disability. In May 2017, the state attorney general’s office decided it lacked grounds to appeal the court’s decision, leaving Bell to face resentencing with a maximum penalty of life without parole. Emily Paavola, one of Bell’s attorneys, said the case fits into a larger narrative of South Carolina’s declining use of capital punishment. “It is increasingly hard to justify retaining the death penalty in South Carolina. Prosecutors rarely seek it, juries more rarely impose it, and even when the rare individual is sentenced to death, the odds are that the defendant will not be executed. We can no longer afford the financial and social costs of such a broken system,” she wrote. The last execution in South Carolina took place in 2011, and since that time only one person has been sentenced to death in the state. Similar declines have occurred nationwide, with death sentences and executions both dropping sharply in recent years. Fewer people were sentenced to death in 2016 than in any year since states began re-enacting the death penalty in 1973, and executions in 2016 were at their lowest level in 25 years.

(D. T. Bland, “Overturned S.C. Sentence Tracks with Decline of Death Penalty,” Free Times, July 5, 2017.) See Intellectual Disability.