Year End Report 2018

Anne Holsinger 0:01

Hello and welcome to Discussions with DPIC. In this episode, we will be discussing DPIC’s annual year end report, which analyzed major news and trends in the death penalty in 2018. I’m Anne Holsinger, Information and Resource Specialist at the Death Penalty Information Center. And I’m joined today by two of our staff members here at DPIC.

Ngozi Ndulue 0:20

I’m Ngozi Ndulue, Director of Research and Special Projects at DPIC.

Robert Dunham 0:25

I’m Robert Dunham, I’m the Executive Director at DPIC. Many years, there’s a particular number that jumps out at us, and this year, the trends are more what’s been happening over the last couple of years. In 2018, we had the first time in the history of the modern death penalty four straight years where fewer than 30 people were executed. Fewer than 50 people were sentenced to death — and so we have this extended trend. Neither of those had happened for a quarter century before. So what we’re seeing this year is basically that the long term decline of the death penalty has continued and it looks like it’s going to be stable.

Anne Holsinger 1:02

What were the other major news stories that happen this year?

Robert Dunham 1:05

Well, I think the key stories are continued movement towards reduced use of the death penalty. So we have Washington State becoming the 20th state in the United States to abolish the death penalty. We have a series of election results where governors in states where they had death penalty moratoria were reelected, so it’s unlikely that executions will resume there. And we’ve had a number of local elections in which voters have opted for reformers and replaced prosecutors who are very heavily pro death penalty. But we’ve also seen big news in the Gallup poll — public support for the death penalty has been dropping for 20 years, and Gallup’s poll results had death penalty support at near a 45 year low of 56%. But the big news there was that for the first time since the polls been asking the question fewer than half of Americans now believe the death penalty is imposed fairly and that’s the lead to deterioration of the death penalty in general, fewer death sentences, fewer executions, but also a continuing decline in the number of people who are on death row. And for the first time in 25 years, fewer than 2500 men and women now face active death sentences. Death row has declined in size for the 18th consecutive year.

Ngozi Ndulue 2:21

The death row decline is really interesting. I mean, because we’re seeing kind of some of the choices that are being made now that are very different from the choices that were made at the height of the imposition of the death penalty. But we’re also seeing things like folks who are aging on death rows, more people kind of dying of natural causes than really being executed. I think that there are some implications for kind of what this the death penalty looks like long term and based on that. Could you talk a little bit about kind of some of those issues with the declining death row population?

Robert Dunham 2:54

Well, and in a lot of respects, the death penalty has become a natural life sentence in solitary confinement. So we have state after state where prisoners are getting into their 50’s, 60’s, 70’s. One execution this year was a man who was 83 years old — Walter Moody, the oldest person ever executed in the modern period of capital punishment. So we’re now having a natural life without parole in solitary confinement in most of the states with capital punishment. The interesting fact is that death row is declining in size as a result of a combination of factors. Death sentences are dropping tremendously. In the mid 1990s, we had three years with more than 300 death sentences in the United States. And as I said a moment ago, for the last four years we’ve had under 50 in each year. We have more death sentences being overturned in the courts than we have new death sentences being imposed and death row is declining in size even as a number of executions is declining, which suggests that the decline is a result of the erosion of capital punishment as opposed to it actually being carried out.

Anne Holsinger 4:05

I think we should also dig in a little bit further into some of the other trends. One thing that you noted was the major decline in new death sentences. And we’ve noticed in particular, a lot of states that have had a history of using the death penalty heavily, really aren’t imposing death sentences anymore. So I know Virginia has had a long trend of no death sentences, Georgia, South Carolina. Could you maybe talk a little bit about why you think that those states are are no longer imposing death sentences?

Robert Dunham 4:33

Sure. And North Carolina also for the first time in its history, had no death sentences for two consecutive years that hasn’t executed anybody for more than a decade. What we’ve seen in a number of the, what I would call traditional death penalty states who have been carrying out a lot and moving it through to executions, is a couple of major changes. The biggest change is the availability of quality indigent defense, so states like Virginia and Georgia and North Carolina and Texas all went to regional capital defender systems or statewide capital defender systems and instead of underfunded, undertrained, inadequately resourced, and in many cases, incompetent court appointed counsel, there now are lawyers who know what they’re doing. That makes a huge difference because someone who appears to be a merciless monster is much more likely to be sentenced to death than someone who the defense is able to explain to the jury has been exposed to chronic trauma, is intellectually disabled or borderline intellectually disabled, has serious mental illness and so was not nearly as morally culpable as the jury would otherwise think. Another major factor is the availability of life without parole as a sentencing option. Many times we’ve seen in the cases from the 80’s and 90’s in the beginning of this century, jurors saying that well, you know, we didn’t really want to impose the death penalty but we thought that the defendant was going to get back out on the street. They didn’t know that life meant life without parole and in a number of the big death sentencing states like Texas, it didn’t mean that. And in a state like Virginia, it meant that, but the jury wasn’t told that. Once the jurors are told that life is life without parole, and they have to balance whether they want somebody to be executed or if they have lingering doubts and they think that that life is enough, they’re much more likely to move to a life sentence. That’s what we saw and death sentences plummeted in Virginia the year after life without parole was explained to the juries — the combination of quality lawyers and life without parole makes a huge difference. There are also some other things. We’re all creatures of our society and there are things that people know sometimes what they know isn’t true. You know, in the in the 90s, they knew that you could get released after a life sentence. That just wasn’t true, but jurors felt like they knew that when they went in to the jury box. Now there’s some other things that they know that they didn’t know then. Two more exonerations this year. So we have 164 people have been wrongly convicted, wrongly sentenced to death and exonerated since 1973. Jurors understand now that you can make mistakes and the fear of executing an innocent person, condemning an innocent person to death, they take that with them into the jury box and that makes a difference. And something we’ll talk about more a bit later is they take a general distrust of government with them. And if you’re going to err on the side of life or death, if you’re going to err on the side of do we trust what the prosecution is telling us if you have increased distrust of government that’s going to have an effect.

Ngozi Ndulue 7:46

And one thing that Rob just brought up was that specter of exoneration and we saw some exonerations this year that I think are important just thinking about the context of that continuing issue and also that intersection between different vulnerabilities as far as foreign nationals being exonerated, so maybe we can talk a little bit about that.

Anne Holsinger 8:07

Yeah both of the men who were exonerated from death row this year were foreign nationals, which means they were not citizens of the United States. Vincente Benavides Figueroa was exonerated in California in April. His conviction was the product of what a court called extensive, pervasive, impactful and false forensic testimony. And then in November we also saw the exoneration of Clemente Aguirre in Florida. And there was also problematic forensic evidence in that case, DNA was part of his exoneration. There was DNA evidence pointing to an alternative suspect and not to Mr. Aguirre. And both of those men were not American citizens, which, as Rob did some analysis found that that puts them in a more vulnerable position in the US criminal justice system. Do you want to explain how that happens?

Robert Dunham 8:59

When we looked at the numbers, we found that there is now one exoneration for every nine executions in the United States, which is a really scary figure. If you get it wrong one 10th of the time, I mean how many innocent lives can a policy reasonably put at risk, but it’s one out of nine when it comes to everybody’s on death row. When it comes to foreign nationals on death row, it’s one out of six. So there is a heightened risk that will be sending foreign nationals to death row who are innocent, that that has to do with the fact that they are an exceptionally vulnerable group when it comes to the criminal justice process you’re dealing with in many instances, individuals who aren’t fluent in English, are certainly not fluent in the American criminal justice system. They are people who are the targets of vindictiveness a lot, and all we have to do is look at the political rhetoric when it comes to immigration and when it comes to “illegal aliens” understand the kind of hysteria that can surround these trials. These two men were the victims of bad evidence and official misconduct and the third exoneration that if we go back the one before that late last year was also a foreign national — Gabriel Solanche in Chicago. So the last three exonerations have been foreign nationals. What it suggests is the same trend that we’ve seen almost everywhere else that the death penalty has been increasingly reserved not for the worst of the worst crimes and the worst of the worst criminals, but for the offenders who are the most vulnerable in the criminal justice system, and who have received the worst of the worst in the way of legal process.

Anne Holsinger 10:46

I think that raises a really important theme from the report this year, which is that the people who were executed this year were overwhelmingly parts of vulnerable groups. We saw that 72% had at least one of the following impairments: significant evidence of mental illness, evidence of brain injury, developmental brain damage, or an IQ in the intellectually disabled range or chronic, serious childhood trauma, neglect or abuse. We also know that six of the people who were executed this year were 21 or younger at the time of their offense. So what do those cases and those impairments say about the criminal justice system? And could you maybe share a few illustrative stories?

Ngozi Ndulue 11:26

I think the United States Supreme Court in the Atkins decision, also in the Roper decision has recognized that there are some groups of people who because of their particular status for Atkins, it was having an intellectual disability, for Roper, it was their youth for people under 18 have particular vulnerabilities in the criminal justice system, where there’s more probability of false confessions where they are less able to kind of protect their rights throughout their case. Where there may be difficulties with cooperating or providing the information that their legal counsel needs to defend them and where juries might not actually take their status into adequate consideration in determining whether they should get the death sentence or a lighter sentence. And we are seeing kind of the outgrowth of these vulnerable categories in the categories that she listed of those who’ve been executed this year where we think of people who have intellectual disabilities and despite that, and despite also faulty process in determining whether or not they should be eligible for the death penalty have been executed. I think an important example of a person in that category is Rodney Berget who was executed this year, despite the fact that he had participated in Special Olympics as a child despite the fact that his initial attorney did not bring up any intellectual disability issues and that full information about his intellectual disabilities was never really addressed by the court due to procedural roadblocks. Another issue that Rodney Berget’s case brings up is this issue of quote unquote volunteers, people who really have given up some of the potential process that’s actually supposed to find out where these errors occurred, and what whether their constitutional rights were violated. So Rodney Berget was a volunteer and there was some last minute intervention by a person who had done significant investigation into his intellectual disability, but that was actually against his wishes because he was trying to be executed. So I think there is significant issues that are raised when we are kind of allowing people to give up some fundamental rights. And with that we’re actually potentially executing people who are in a category that the United States Supreme Court has already said is incredibly vulnerable in the criminal justice system and should not be executed.

Robert Dunham 14:08

And the volunteers point out something that I think one of the major practical flaws with the way the death penalty is administered in the United States. The people who tend to give up their rights are people with demonstrated significant mental illness or emotional disturbance and so they are the ones who are in many respects likely to have the most serious legal challenges to bring in their cases, but because they are deemed competent to waive their rights, those legal challenges are never heard. And you end up with an unreliable legal process, refusing to consider the reliability of the convictions and essence we now are at the stage where 10% of all the people executed in the United States since executions resumed in 1977 gave up some of their rights. And if we want the death penalty in the United States, if we want to have this institution, it’s imperative that it’d be able to accurately assess whether somebody was barely tried, whether somebody who’s fairly sentenced and whether the individual deserves to live or die. But you cannot do that when appellate review is curtailed because the courts are permitting somebody who is emotionally damaged, intellectually disabled, or seriously mentally ill to essentially commit state assisted suicide and then say, look, we’re gonna let you die and we’re not going to review whether the case was properly tried and whether you were properly sentenced to death. We see these problems continuing because when we look at the new death sentences that were imposed this year, there were a number of cases in which defendants who are of questionable competence were permitted to waive their rights, were permitted to fire their lawyers, were permitted to represent themselves, were permitted to ask the courts to impose the death penalty and then, without consideration of the mental health mitigating evidence, because the mentally ill prisoner did not allow that evidence to be presented and the court permitted the evidence to be excluded by letting the the prisoner attempt to commit suicide, we end up with completely unreliable death rates. These are the type of people, who, represented by competent counsel, most of the time get sentenced to life so we already know that these new death sentences in these cases are very unreliable.

Anne Holsinger 16:35

Another major issue that arose in a lot of the executions this year was the continuing controversy over lethal injection drugs. Ngozi, do you want to maybe give an overview of some of the issues that were presented related to lethal injection?

Ngozi Ndulue 16:48

Sure, there were several issues that came up this year regarding lethal injection. One of them was the continued problematic executions that we’ve seen throughout the states. I think we can think about these two states here. So in Nebraska with execution of Carey Dean Moore, there was a prolonged period where curtains were closed, people did not know what was going on during the execution and this was an untested method that was being used for Mr. Moore’s execution.

Robert Dunham 17:23

One of the interesting things about the Nebraska execution as you said, the curtain was closed and the eye witnesses were looking at the execution and so far as they could tell it appeared to be going normally, but they did report that they saw Carey Dean Moore’s face, turning a bluish purple and then he seemed to see some moving. The curtains closed, they assumed that he was dead, the curtains open 14 minutes later and they were told that he had died. They didn’t know that he died when the curtain was closed. They didn’t see what was going on and that’s one of the things that we talked about in the secrecy report that we issued in November, that there are these problems with the executions and there’s no transparency. There’s no way to find out whether the state is performing competently, or hiding its mistakes or misconduct from the public. Rodney Berget’s another example. The public didn’t know at the time of his execution, what South Dakota was going to be executing him with, what drug they’re going to be using. They later said that they were using pentobarbital. Nobody knew where it came from and, as was later discovered, Texas had been using an anonymous pharmaceutical company to produce pentobarbital that it used in its executions and we reported that in 5 of the 13 executions, the prisoners indicated that they were aware of burning or pain when the drug was injected. A sixth prisoner was observed writhing and grimacing during the course of what is supposed to be a painless execution if pentobarbital is used and it’s appropriately produced. It turns out that a BuzzFeed investigation by Chris McDaniel discovered that the pharmacy that Texas had been using had a series of 48 health and safety violations and had been cited for violations over the period of the last eight years. It was one of only a handful of Texas’ 200 compounding pharmacies to have its license suspended or revoked — it had a suspended license and this was the company that was providing the execution drugs. Well, we know in the past, that Texas has provided execution drugs to other states when they were unable to obtain drugs themselves. And no one has said how South Dakota got its drugs for Rodney Berget, but his last words were, “is it supposed to feel like this”, suggesting that the pentobarbital that they used was outdated or tainted. And these are the types of problems that the execution secrecy is preventing us from getting to the bottom of — are states using appropriate drugs when they’re carrying out these executions?

Ngozi Ndulue 20:11

Another example of how much secrecy can really inhibit our ability to figure out what’s actually going on at the state level around lethal injection is what’s happened in Tennessee this past year. Prisoners in Tennessee challenged the new protocol the state put in place early in 2018, but they were inhibited because the state of Tennessee was unwilling to answer questions about its attempts to procure other drugs. They were unable to actually successfully challenge the state’s new protocol. So in Billy Ray Irick’s case, there was an attempt to stop his execution because of the state’s new lethal injection protocol. The prisoners suggested that the state could change to a one drug protocol using pentobarbital, but at the last minute the state said that drug was unavailable, so the prisoners were left to scramble, either to show a different alternative, or to show that the drug was truly available. But without information about how the state tried to get pentobarbital, the prisoners had no ability to actually challenge the state’s assertions. The issues with state secrecy were recognized by a Justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court, Justice Sharon Lee, were recognized by Justice Sotomayor of the United States Supreme Court, and that execution went forward without actual transparency. And we know from later expert reports that Billy Ray Irick was tortured during his execution because of the medical evidence that was found from his autopsy. After that, Tennessee prisoners were really given the untenable choice between the potential torturous death of that current lethal injection protocol or going back to some earlier forms of execution. So because of that, two Tennessee prisoners chose to be executed by the electric chair because they were so concerned about the torture that they could undergo because of this lethal injection protocol.

Robert Dunham 22:23

We talked a lot about legal technicalities in capital cases, but when we get to this issue, it really comes down to fairness and decency and I think that the secrecy and the law that was developed by the United States Supreme Court is particularly problematic here. You know, we’re dealing first with the Supreme Court requiring a prisoner to provide the state with an alternative method for killing himself, basically. And I think of the stories about the movie villains who has who have a captive and to show their humanity what they say is “no, you’re gonna die, but I’m gonna let you choose the way that you die.” That’s something that we expect from a grade B-horror movie. It’s not something we expect from the United States Supreme Court. It’s not something that we think is a decent way of carrying out the law. But when you combine that really terrible law, something Justice Sotomayor described as a descent into barbarism, then I think that that we we get a better sense of what’s going on here. So the U.S. Supreme Court creates this macabre requirement that prisoners have to come up with an alternative method of their own demise and then the courts permit states to engage in secrecy that prevents the prisoners from actually presenting evidence that there are less painful alternatives available. It’s even worse here in the Tennessee case because the prisoners initially, when Tennessee came up with its is lethal injection protocol, the prisoners challenged both the electric chair and the three drug method execution. The Tennesse Court said you can’t challenge the electric chair, we aren’t using it right now — that’s premature, and so that gets put aside. And then when the prisoners try to challenge lethal injection, they allow the state to hide behind secrecy, so he can’t, the prisoners can’t come up with a less painful alternative. Then facing what they say is 18 minutes of torture where they’re aware of being paralyzed and suffocated by the second drug, the paralytic drug and are conscious while they’re being chemically burned at the stake by the potassium chloride, the killing drug and so experienced this 18 minutes of torture prisoners said, “Well, we know, we know how bad the electric chair is, but it’s going to be a half minute to a minute of torture. And so we would take that over and an extended torture but we don’t think we should be subjected to either because that’s, that’s cruel and unusual too.” And the electric chair was on its way out, it gave way to lethal injection in many states because it was perceived as a cruel punishment. Well, the prisoners come back and they challenge the electric chair say well now it’s the option and the court say well sorry you chose it. I mean, what kind of system is that? If we want to have a reliable system and a system that’s fair and the system that respects human dignity this isn’t it.

Anne Holsinger 25:36

Rob, you mentioned at the beginning the changes that we’ve seen in public opinion. This year, we also had a major announcement from Pope Francis who revised the Catholic catechism to declare the death penalty inadmissible. Do you think that’s going to have an impact on public opinion or on the death penalty in general?

Robert Dunham 25:52

I think it will. I think it’s gonna be hard to quantify, but it will definitely have an effect and in fact we’ve seen in a number of states that already has had an effect. Some of the legislators have been questioning how they can reconcile their pro death penalty beliefs with their Catholic beliefs and one of the important things from a practical matter about the change in the Catechism not just that Pope Francis has become a moral beacon on this issue and adopted it as one of his major causes, but that the Catechism now commits the Catholic Church to acting to try to abolish the death penalty worldwide. A couple of weeks ago we spoke with Cardinal Cupich on a previous podcast and he indicated that the church was going to be trying to figure out how to bring that about how to put it into practical effect. And I think what we’re beginning to see is that the bishops and the priests locally are speaking out more forcefully on this and in many of the states the survival of the death penalty will be contingent upon a few swing votes. In a number of the states those swing votes are pro death penalty Catholics and as the legislature changes, as new representatives come in, and as the pro death penalty Catholics reconsider their beliefs and reconsider the political consequences of voting against the death penalty. I think the Pope’s statement makes it more acceptable for them to do what they think in their hearts may be the right thing and make them believe that it’s more politically defensible because they’re following the guidance of the Pope and the church that may make the difference in some of these swing states.

Anne Holsinger 27:46

What do this year’s election results say about the status of the death penalty and what it will look like going forward?

Robert Dunham 27:53

I think the election results are really interesting because they at one level say, what you think about the death penalty if it’s not extreme isn’t going to make a difference. There were Governor’s races in three states where moratoriums had been imposed: Pennsylvania, Colorado, Oregon. And in each of those states, the governors who impose the moratorium who are up for for reelection and were easily reelected. In Colorado, Governor Hickenlooper who had and post the moratorium was term limited, he couldn’t run again, but the voters elected governor Polis, who campaigned saying that he was opposed to the death penalty and would sign a bill to abolish it. So in the three states with moratoria, the elections ensure that there won’t be executions in those states going forward at least in the near term. Now that’s not to say that the election results say the American public is opposed to the death penalty. It is increasingly opposed to the death penalty but at the same time that the governor’s imposing moratoria were reelected. the governors who had vetoed bills to abolish the death penalty also were reelected. Governor Ricketts was reelected in Nebraska, Governor Sununu was reelected in New Hampshire. And I think the New Hampshire election is really interesting in showing that the death penalty has both ceased to be a wedge issue and really is not one of the major concerns of electors when they go to the polls now — they’re concerned about other things. At the same time that the governor who vetoed the death penalty repeal bill was reelected, New Hampshire voters selected a legislature that appears to be even more opposed to the death penalty than the legislature that was in place before. There now appears to be a veto-proof majority in the state senate and possibly in the state house and as a result of the midterm elections, there’s a very substantial chance that New Hampshire will vote to repeal the death penalty and override a governor’s veto.

Ngozi Ndulue 29:58

Prosecutor elections have been really interesting where we’ve seen prosecutors who have been specifically critical of the death penalty being elected. And we’ve also seen a number of prosecutors who have been in these outlier counties which in DPIC’s 2% report were being shown as some of these counties that had a high rate of death sentencing being ousted.

Robert Dunham 30:22

Yeah, I think that’s really interesting because conventional views about the death penalty didn’t affect elections, but it now appears that over use of the death penalty, overly harsh punishment is considered to be unacceptable now, and that has played into the the local elections. In 2013, we issued a report called the 2% Death Penalty that documented that more than half of all the death sentences the United States come from fewer than 2% of the counties. We look at the prosecutorial elections since 2015 in the 30 most prolific deat sentencing counties in the United States and what we found is that, since 2015, 11 of the prosecutors in those top 30 counties have been defeated in the polls and that happens six times this year. That suggests that the growing public appetite for criminal justice reform, the adoption of smart on crime as opposed to harsh on crime as the appropriate way of dealing with criminal justice issues is going to have effects on the death penalty. In some of these cases reform candidates expressly said that they were going to rely on the death penalty less or not use it all. In others, they just campaign for reform. When they win, we invariably see that the death penalty is used less frequently. And the fact that the counties that most aggressively pursued the death penalty and most disproportionately obtained the death penalty are moving away from capital punishment suggests that in the long term, the death penalty is going to remain in decline that will have lower levels of death sentencing, at least in these big counties. And the best example of that, I think, is Philadelphia. This year, Larry Krasner took office in Philadelphia, and he was one of the reform candidates who had pledged not to use the death penalty. For the first time in the modern history of the death penalty, Philadelphia had no capital prosecutions, and as a result of that, death sentences have declined not just in the city but Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. One of the most interesting figures that I saw in California and in Pennsylvania, the largest and fifth largest death rows in the United States, largely as a result of the decrease in death sentences in these outlier counties, they both had record low numbers of death sentences. California for the first time in the modern history of capital punishment had only five death sentences statewide and Pennsylvania, for only the second time in the modern history of the state’s death penalty had only one. The states that had previously accounted for one third of the death row in the United States between them had six death sentences and I think that that is an astonishing figure, something that tells you not just about the depth of the decline of the death penalty, but the breadth of the decline is that for the first time in the history of the death penalty, and we trace this back to 1973 year by year, county by county, state by state for the first time in the modern history of the death penalty, no county in the entire United States imposed more than two death sentences.

Anne Holsinger 33:36

Are there any other points from the report that we haven’t touched on yet that you’d like to discuss?

Robert Dunham 33:40

I think there’s one more thing with Nevada and we were talking a bit about volunteers and how they render the process unreliable — volunteers as in people who give up their rights and ask to be executed. We nearly had that happen also in Nevada. When Nebraska had its first execution in years, Carey Dean Moore, he was a volunteer he gave up his rights. When South Dakota had its first execution in years, Rodney Berget, intellectually disabled, he gave up his rights. The same thing looked like it was going to happen in Nevada — Scott Dozier said he wanted to be executed. And then something extraordinary happened. Alvogen, the drug company, found out that Nevada had obtained its drugs through fraud. Alvogen said that the state had misled the company into believing that it was buying the drugs for medical purposes, so Alvogen went to court and the court found that Nevada had engaged in this, the court’s word ‘subterfuge’ to obtain the drugs. It barred Nevada from using those drugs in carrying out the execution so Scott Dozier wasn’t executed. This illustrates a couple of things. One is how the volunteers make the system unreliable but also the questionable trustworthiness of the states to carry out this policy. We’ve known for years that the death sentences themselves when they’re imposed can be unreliable — 164 exonerations, the most likely outcome of a capital case is that it will be reversed, not that the prisoner is going to be executed. And the most frequent cause of a wrongful capital conviction is police or prosecutorial misconduct. So there are significant questions as to whether we can trust the states to carry out this policy well. What we see with the executions is it goes even beyond the trial itself. States are hiding behind the veil of secrecy and engaging in all sorts of improper and illegal acts to try to obtain the drugs and that is another factor that we’re seeing something that is, I think, going to have a prolonged and lingering effect, which is will the public believe with a punishment like this, that we can trust the states to carry it out fairly? In 2018, death sentences were down, executions were down for a variety of reasons. But I think one of the reasons it’s going to last and contribute to a continued reduction in the future is that more and more people think that we can’t trust the states to carry it out.

Anne Holsinger 36:25

Thank you for joining us for Discussions with DPIC. To read the full year end report visit deathpenaltyinfo.org/yearend2018. To make sure you never miss an episode subscribe to Discussions with DPIC on your podcast app of choice.