About one-quarter of Ohio’s death row inmates come from Hamilton County (Cincinnati), but only 9% of the state’s murders occur there. (R. Willing and G. Fields, Geography of the Death Penalty, USA Today, Dec. 20, 1999).
Baltimore City had only one person on Maryland’s death row, but suburban Baltimore County, with one tenth as many murders as the city, had nine times the number on death row. (L. Montgomery, Md. Questioning Local Extremes on Death Penalty, Wash. Post, May 12, 2002).
An investigation by seven Indiana newspapers in 2001 found that the death penalty depended on factors such as the views of individual prosecutors and the financial resources of the county. Two Indiana counties have produced almost as many death sentences as all of the other Indiana counties combined. (S. Bend Trib., Oct. 21, 2001).
In New York, which abolished the death penalty in 2007, upstate counties experienced just 19% of the state’s homicides, but they nonetheless accounted for 61% of all capital prosecutions. Three counties (out of 62 in the state) accounted for over one-third of all cases in which a death notice was filed. (Capital Punishment in New York State: Statistics from Six Years of Representation, Report from the Capital Defender Office, Sept. 2001 (data through June 30, 2001)).
