Virginia, Pennsylvania Death Rows Smallest in a Quarter Century as Death Sentences Show Long-Term Decline

Death rows are shrink­ing nation­wide, and the expe­ri­ence in states like Virginia and Pennsylvania helps explain why. Virginia’s death row has fall­en from a report­ed high of 58 in 1995 to four in September 2017, the low­est it has been since 1979. Pennsylvania’s death row of 160 pris­on­ers is its small­est in near­ly 25 years — down from 175 last December and from a report­ed 247 in April 2002.

These declines mir­ror the nation­al trends, as the num­ber of pris­on­ers removed from death row con­tin­ues to out­strip the num­ber of new death sen­tences imposed. 

In May 2017, a Bureau of Justice Statistics report showed that the pop­u­la­tion of death row nation­wide had decreased for 15 con­sec­u­tive years. Although Virginia has exe­cut­ed more pris­on­ers since 1976 than any oth­er state but Texas, exe­cu­tions do not by them­selves account for the mag­ni­tude of the decline, and Pennsylvania’s death row has shrunk despite not hav­ing exe­cut­ed any­one this century. 

A com­bi­na­tion of exon­er­a­tions, court deci­sions over­turn­ing death sen­tences, com­mu­ta­tions, and deaths while appeals were under­way have also removed sig­nif­i­cant num­bers of pris­on­ers from the two Commonwealths’ death rows. Moreover, as in states like Georgia and Missouri that have been among the nation’s most pro­lif­ic recent exe­cu­tion­ers, the increase in exe­cu­tions has been accom­pa­nied by a decrease in the num­ber of new death sen­tences imposed by juries. 

State Delegate Robert B. Bell, a death-penal­ty pro­po­nent who chairs the Virginia State Crime Commission, said obtain­ing the death penal­ty has become ​“an ardu­ous endeav­or for pros­e­cu­tors,” requir­ing expen­di­tures of staff time and finan­cial resources that small coun­ties cannot afford. 

As in Georgia and Texas, which have expe­ri­enced major declines in new death sen­tences, Virginia also has made tri­als fair­er by cre­at­ing region­al cap­i­tal defense offices that pro­vide bet­ter rep­re­sen­ta­tion to indi­gent defen­dants at tri­al and by inform­ing juries that cap­i­tal defen­dants who are sen­tenced to life in prison will not be eli­gi­ble for parole. Low mur­der rates and his­tor­i­cal­ly low pub­lic sup­port for the death penal­ty also have con­tributed to the decline in new death sen­tences. In Pennsylvania, more than fifty defen­dants have been removed from death row in the past decade as their con­vic­tions or death sen­tences were over­turned and they were resen­tenced to terms of life or less, and more have had their sen­tences over­turned in the interim. 

Recently, the removal of pris­on­ers from the Commonwealth’s death row accel­er­at­ed after a fed­er­al appeals court struck down the state’s long-stand­ing prac­tice of auto­mat­i­cal­ly keep­ing cap­i­tal defen­dants in soli­tary con­fine­ment until they had com­plet­ed their retri­al or resen­tenc­ing pro­ceed­ings, even after courts had over­turned their death sentences.