Amnesty International reported that worldwide executions spiked by 54% to at least 1,634—a 25-year high—in 2015, even as the number of countries abolishing the death penalty reached record levels. In its annual report on global developments in capital punishment, released on April 6, Amnesty said that the bulk of recorded executions were concentrated in just three outlier countries—Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. These countries accounted for 89% of all recorded executions. (Amnesty did not set a figure for executions in China, where data on capital punishment is considered a state secret. The report estimates that China executes "in the thousands" of prisoners each year and conducted more executions than any other country in 2015.) Pakistan conducted the highest number of executions (326) ever recorded in that country, as it resumed executions after a six-year moratorium, and Egypt and Somalia had significant increases in executions, although both executed fewer prisoners than did the United States. At the same time, 2015 saw the largest number of countries abolishing the death penalty in more than a decade, as four more countries (Republic of Congo, Fiji, Madagascar, and Suriname) officially ended the practice. The total number of abolitionist countries rose to 102, with 140 countries having either abolished the death penalty altogether or not carried out any executions in more than a decade. The United States ranked fifth in the number of executions carried out last year, with executions also concentrated in a few high-use jurisdictions—just three states carried out 86% of executions, reflecting the same patterns seen globally in the use of the death penalty. The report emphasized the outlier status of the few nations that continue to perform executions, saying, "Today the majority of the world’s countries are fully abolitionist, and dozens more have not implemented death sentences for more than a decade, or have given clear indications that they are moving towards full abolition. The starkly opposing developments that mark 2015 underscore the extent to which the countries that use the death penalty are becoming the isolated minority." (Click image to enlarge.) 

Forty years after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld newly enacted death penalty statutes in Gregg v. Georgia and two other cases, Professor Evan J. Mandery of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice says arbitrariness continues to plague the administration of capital punishment across the United States. In a piece for The Marshall Project, Professor Mandery revisits the death penalty in light of the constitutional defects that led the Supreme Court to overturn existing capital punishment statutes in Furman v. Georgia in 1972. He finds that "[w]hether one interprets the Furman decision to have been about — individually or collectively — excessive racism, a failure to identify the 'worst of the worst' among murderers, the death penalty’s sporadic use, or simple geographical randomness, the 'guided discretion' statutes endorsed in Gregg haven’t remotely fulfilled their promise. Randomness has not been reduced and in many respects has grown substantially worse." On the issue of "sporadic use," Professor Mandery cites studies that show state-level death sentencing rates for eligible crimes of 0.56% (Colorado) to 5.5% (California), both of which are dramatically lower than the 15-20% threshold that had raised concerns in Furman. States' failures to identify the "worth of the worst" murderers is evident, he says, in both the expansion of death-eligible crimes (91.1% of murders in Colorado are eligible under the state's death penalty statute) and studies that found no consistent differences in egregiousness of crimes that received death sentences and those that didn't. "Whatever they may have written, [Justice] Stewart, Stevens and Powell’s true project in Gregg was to rationalize the American death penalty and make sentencing decisions turn on the severity of a defendant’s offense instead of random factors, such as where the crime occurred, or insidious factors, such as race." Mandery says. He concludes: "On the occasion of its 40th anniversary, we can deem that project a complete and dismal failure." 

The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles announced on March 31 that it had denied clemency to Joshua Bishop. Bishop had asked that his death sentence be reduced to life without parole because his co-defendant, who was nearly twice Bishop's age at the time of the crime, and had a history of violent crime while Bishop did not, was given a plea deal resulting in a life sentence. Bishop is scheduled to be executed in Georgia on March 31. Seven of the twelve jurors who voted to sentence Bishop to death now support a sentence reduction for a variety of reasons. Juror Jeremy Foston said he initially, "was leaning toward a life sentence because Mr. Bishop had a terrible childhood and was just a young man." Others said they were confused by instructions that the jury had to be unanimous. Juror Jim Ray wrote, "[w]e really struggled with our decision. We eventually changed our vote to a death sentence partly because we were told we had to be unanimous and those [two jurors] who wanted the death penalty were very firm in their conviction and let us know they would not change their minds." The belief that Bishop's co-defendant, Mark Braxley, would also face the possibility of a death sentence influenced some jurors' decisions. They say they would have sentenced Bishop to life without parole if they knew Braxley had received a plea deal for a life sentence. Juror Jeremy Foston wrote, "We wanted to make sure Mr. Braxley would get the same punishment as Mr. Bishop. We even sent a note out asking if we could know what would happen to him. The prosecutor told us not to worry about Mr. Braxley, and that he would have his day in court. We assumed that meant he would have the same treatment as Mr. Bishop."

In one week, courts in unrelated cases have granted relief to two Alabama death row inmates because of prosecutorial misconduct. On March 11, Alabama Circuit Judge Robert Smith dismissed capital charges against ex-state trooper George Martin and barred his retrial because of the prosecution's "willful misconduct." Martin had been convicted for allegedly murdering his wife in a car fire. In 2000, jurors recommended that Martin be sentenced to life, but the trial judge overrode their recommendation and imposed a death sentence. In that trial, the prosecution asserted that Martin had burned his wife alive, but suppressed a witness's statement that she kept a can of gas in her car. It also willfully withheld evidence that it had shown photos of every black trooper from Mobile County to a white witness who had seen a "large black man" in a trooper's uniform in the vicinity of the car, and that the witness not only had not identified Martin (who is 5'6"), but had selected the picture of a different trooper. Judge Smith wrote, "If the Martin case is not one which is appropriate for dismissal, there may never be one....The affirmative use by the prosecutors of partial truths and untruths with knowledge," he wrote, constituted "willful misconduct." One week later, on March 18, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals ordered a new trial for Derek Horton because the prosecution had improperly attempted "[t]o buttress its weak case" against Horton for the murder of a woman in a burglarized mobile home by presenting evidence of his past drug use and of an investigation against him for domestic violence. The court said this evidence of bad character was "superfluous to the State's case" and "served no purpose other than to paint Horton as a drug-using, drug-dealing criminal who had a propensity to commit violent crimes against women." The court found the use of this evidence especially prejudicial because the state had "produced no witnesses or direct evidence placing Horton at [the victim]'s mobile home at the time of the crime" and his fingerprints were not found on any of the murder weapon or any of the items taken from the mobile home or strewn about the highway in the vicinity of the location in which the victim's stolen car had been abandoned.