News and Developments 2010: Sentencing

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.

A new report by Victor Streib, Professor of Law at Ohio Northern University, highlights trends in the death penalty regarding female offenders. The report shows that the death penalty in the United States is rarely imposed on women. Of the approximately 8,200 death sentences that have been imposed across the U.S. since 1973, less than 2% have been imposed on female defendants (167 out of 8,292, at the time of the report’s publication). Additionally, only 1% of executions in the modern era (since 1976) have been of women (12 out of 1232). The report also shows that over 50% of women currently on death row were convicted of killing a close family member.  Most women were convicted of killing their husbands or boyfriends, or children close to them. Finally, the study observed that the execution of women accounted for only 0.6% of all executions since the 1900s. When compared to earlier eras in American history, this data indicates that the practice of executing women is rarer than in previous centuries.  Click here for full report.

A recent article in Second Class Justice, a weblog dedicated to addressing unfairness and discrimination in the criminal justice system, highlighted that the death penalty continues to be arbitrarily applied in the United States. Citing figures from the American Judicature Society, author Robert Smith revealed that only 10% of U.S. counties accounted for all of the death sentences imposed between 2004 and 2009, and only 5% of the counties accounted for all death sentences between 2007 and 2009. Even in states that frequently impose the death penalty (such as Texas, Alabama, Florida, California and Oklahoma), only a few counties produce the state’s death sentences.  According to the article, “The murders committed in those counties are no more heinous than murders committed in other counties, nor are the offenders in those counties more incorrigible than those who commit crimes in other counties. Examination of prosecutorial practices demonstrate that some prosecutors seek death in cases in their jurisdictions while other prosecutors in the rest of the state do not seek death for the same – or even more aggravated – murders.”  The article contains a series of slides illustrating the geographical disparities of the death penalty.