News and Developments 2006: Death Row

One of the first inmates scheduled to be executed in 2007 is Ronald Chambers, who has been on death row since Gerald Ford was President, and longer than any other inmate in Texas.  He is facing execution on January 25, thirty-one years after he was first sentenced to death for murder.  His co-defendant in the crime, Clarence Ray Williams, pleaded guilty and is serving two life sentences.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics has just released the 2005 version of its annual report on the death penalty in the U.S. The report notes that both the number of death sentences and the size of death row were down for 2005, and that this represents a trend over the past 5 years. The report states that there were 60 executions in 2005, all by lethal injection, and that the time between sentencing and execution was longer in 2005 than in 2004.

"Reflective Glass" is a new book by death row inmate G. Wilford Hathorn.  The book is a collection of fifteen essays that deal with life on Texas' death row from a prisoner's perspective. The essays describe many aspects of death row life: the pain of losing friends through execution, the medical treatment of prisoners, the monotony of living in a tiny cell, and the interaction with guards.

The latest edition of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's Death Row USA shows an 8% decline in the country's death row population during the past 5 years, down from 3,652 in 2000 to 3,373 at the end of 2005. According to the report, California continues to have the nation's largest death row population (649), followed by Texas (409), Florida (388), Pennsylvania (231), and Ohio (196).