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.

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