News and Developments 2010: Studies

A new study published in the Washington Law Review addresses the racial and geographical disparities in the implementation of the federal death penalty. The study, conducted by G. Ben Cohen, Counsel for the Capital Appeals Project in New Orleans, and Robert J. Smith, Counsel for the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, concludes that the disparities in the federal death penalty may exist because federal cases do not use a county-level jury pool but instead employ a wider pool from the federal-district level, resulting in the dilution of minority representation in the jury pool. According to the authors, “Capital verdicts become separated from the moral judgments of the community when [there are] fewer minority group members in the jury pool.” They proposed utilizing a county-level jury pool as is done in state cases: “If federal capital juries come from the county where the offense occurred, then prosecutors are left to determine whether to seek the death penalty based on the relative federal interest in the crime (and not the prosecutorial interest to secure a death sentence by any means possible). This solution is also more democratic—the citizens most impacted by the effects of high crime, overly aggressive policing, or poor public policy are the decision-makers responsible for redressing those harms.”

On February 11, 2011, a symposium will be held at the Vermont Law School in South Royalton to explore current issues in capital punishment. Entitled New Perspectives on Capital Punishment, the symposium will address the death penalty from the point of view of scholars, litigators, and educators. The goal of the symposium is to contribute to the vital discourse concerning capital punishment and its human rights implications. It will feature Hugo Adam Bedau, a prominent death penalty scholar.  Other speakers include nationally recognized death penalty litigators Mark Olive and Sean O'Brien, lethal injection expert Deborah Denno, constitutional scholar Eric Freedman, acclaimed sociologist Michael Radelet, and international law attorney Sandra Babcock. The symposium will address topics such as Applied Theory and Litigation Strategies and International Law and Capital Punishment.

On December 21, the Death Penalty Information Center released its latest report, “The Death Penalty in 2010: Year End Report,” on statistics and trends in capital punishment in the past year.  The report noted there was a 12% decrease in executions in 2010 compared to 2009 and a more than 50% drop compared to 1999. DPIC projected that the number of new death sentences will be 114 for 2010, near last year’s number of 112, which was the lowest number since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Death sentences declined in all four regions of the country over the past ten years, with a 50 percent decrease nationwide when the current decade is compared to the 1990s.  Only 12 states carried out executions in 2010, mostly in the South, and only seven states carried out more than one execution. Texas led the country with 17 executions, but that was a significant drop from last year.  The number of new death sentences in Texas this year was 8, a dramatic decline from 1999 when 48 people were sentenced to death.  Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, 82% of the executions have been in the South. California has not had an execution in almost 5 years, and the same is true for North Carolina, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and many other states that rarely carry out the death penalty.  “Whether it’s concerns about the high costs of the death penalty at a time when budgets are being slashed, the risks of executing the innocent, unfairness, or other reasons, the nation continued to move away from the death penalty in 2010,” said Richard Dieter, DPIC’s Executive Director and the report’s author.