Policy Issues
Sentencing Alternatives
Alternative sentences, such as life without parole, avoid some of the key problems with capital punishment, including the high cost of the death penalty and the risk of executing an innocent person.
DPIC Podcast: Discussions With DPIC
Missouri Attorney Discusses Winning Life Sentence in Federal Prison-Killing Case
Overview
Increasingly, discussion around the death penalty has shifted from a moral debate to a comparison of capital punishment to its viable alternatives. The choice today for jurors, legislators, and the courts is between the death penalty and the sentence of life without parole. All states that have the death penalty also have a sentence of life without parole (LWOP). Victims’ families often prefer LWOP to the uncertainty and the spectacle of the death penalty. Many prosecutors have come to the conclusion that the costs associated with capital cases are not worth their limited resources, especially since so many cases are overturned. As the use of LWOP has expanded, the number of death sentences has declined dramatically.
In addition to the use of LWOP, states have also looked beyond punishment to alternative ways of reducing violent crime, including community policing, the introduction of crime-fighting technology, and restorative justice. The money saved from not seeking the death penalty can be used to support those initiatives.
At Issue
Although prosecutors often allow a capital defendant to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence, many are reluctant to eliminate the death penalty itself because they see it as a bargaining chip. This role of the death penalty as a threat is suspect on both ethical and constitutional grounds.
Some opponents of capital punishment also question the use of life-without-parole sentences as another form of a death sentence and note its expanded use even in non-capital cases.
What DPIC Offers
Many opinion polls today contrast the death penalty with LWOP, and DPIC has collected the results of those surveys. DPIC provides research on when each state’s legislature adopted LWOP. It also examines how LWOP is arrived at in a particular case if the jury cannot agree on a death sentence.
Nov 24, 2020
Gallup Poll: Public Support for the Death Penalty Lowest in a Half-Century
Public support for the death penalty is at its lowest level in a half-century, with opposition higher than any time since 1966, according to the 2020 annual Gallup poll on Americans’ attitudes about capital punishment. Fifty-five percent o…
Read MoreNews & Developments
Sentencing Alternatives
Mar 21, 2023
California to Close San Quentin’s Death Row as Part of a Broader Prison Reform
Death-sentenced prisoners in California will be moved out of San Quentin State Prison (pictured) and placed in other maximum security facilities, as part of a broad plan announced by Governor Gavin Newsom on March 17, 2023. The governor seeks to “…
Mental Illness
Oct 13, 2022
Non-Unanimous Florida Jury Sentences Nikolas Cruz to Life Without Parole for Parkland School Shootings
A non-unanimous Florida jury has returned a verdict of life without parole for Nikolas Cruz, the teen offender convicted of killing 17 people in the February 14, 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas H…
Innocence
Sep 19, 2022
Texas Prosecutors Drop Death Penalty Against African American Man Held Eight Years Without Trial in Death of White Police Officer During Botched No-Knock Raid
Bell County prosecutors have dropped their efforts to impose the death penalty on Marvin Guy (pictured), an African American man who has been held eight years without trial in connection with the death of a white…
International
Aug 30, 2022
Mother of Murdered Journalist Calls Life Sentence for ISIS Captors ‘A Huge Victory,’ Better than the Death Penalty
On the eighth anniversary of the August 19, 2014 murder of kidnapped journalist James Foley, a U.S. federal district court in Virginia sentenced his killer, Islamic State militant El Shafee Elsheikh, to eight life sentences in pri…
Sentencing Alternatives
May 26, 2022
Judge Rejects Missouri’s First Jury Recommendation of Death in Nine Years, Says Mitigating Evidence Requires Life Sentence for Marvin Rice
A Missouri judge has rejected the state’s first jury recommendation for a death sentence in nine years, and has instead re-sentenced former death-row prisoner Marvin D. Rice (pictured) to life without parole. …
Prosecutorial Accountability
Mar 08, 2022
Nearly Six Years After Supreme Court Granted Him a New Trial, Timothy Foster Resentenced to Life
Timothy Foster, whose conviction and death sentence were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016 because Georgia prosecutors discriminatorily struck Black jurors from serving in his case, has been resentenced…
Capital Case Development
Dec 12, 2021
After Second Non-Unanimous Jury Verdict, Paul Durousseau Re-Sentenced to Life in Prison in Florida
Florida death-row prisoner Paul Durousseau was re-sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole December 10, 2021, when a second capital sentencing jury reached a non-unanimous sentencing verdict. Durousseau was…
Arbitrariness
Nov 23, 2021
California Penal Code Committee Recommends Repealing State’s Death Penalty
The Committee on Revision of the Penal Code, created by the California state legislature to review the state’s criminal laws, has issued a report unanimously recommending that the state repeal its death penalty. T…
Sentencing Alternatives
Oct 07, 2021
Report: More Women Serving Extreme Sentences in the United States
The number of women serving extreme sentences in the United States has increased sharply in the last decade, a September 2021 report by a collaborative of criminal law reform organizations has found. The report,
Sentencing Alternatives
Sep 16, 2021
NEW SCHOLARSHIP: History Says Those Left on Death Row After Capital Punishment Statutes are Struck Down or Repealed Should Not be Executed
“What should become of individuals who are awaiting execution following the repeal or judicial invalidation of capital punishment legislation?,” ask authors James R. Acker (pictured, left) and Brian W. Stull (pict…
