Death Row

The latest edition of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's Death Row USA shows a decrease of 31 inmates between January 1 and July 1, 2011.  Over the last decade, the total population of state and federal death rows has decreased significantly, from 3,682 inmates in 2000 to 3,220 inmates in 2011.  The percentage of Latino inmates facing execution, however, has steadily increased over the years.  In 1991, Latinos made up 6% of the nation's death row.  In 2011, Latinos or Latinas comprised 12% of death row inmates.  The states with the largest number of Hispanic death row inmates are California (167), Texas (95) and Florida (37).  The report also contains information on the race and gender of the victims in the underlying murders for those executed.  In cases where an execution has occurred since 1976, 77% of the victims in the underlying murders were white, even though generally whites constitute slightly less than 50% of all murders.

The latest edition of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's "Death Row USA" showed a decrease of 29 inmates in the death row population between January 1 and April 1, 2011. The total population of state and federal death rows is significantly smaller now (3,222 inmates) than in 2000 (3,682 inmates). The size of death row is affected by the number of death sentences, the number of executions, and the number of sentence reversals. Nationally, the racial composition of those on death row is 44% white, 42% black, and 12% Latino/Latina. California continues to have the largest death row population (717), followed by Florida (400), Texas (321), Pennsylvania (219), and Alabama (206). Neither California nor Pennsylvania have carried out an execution in the past six years. The report also contains information on the race and gender of the victims in the underlying murders for those executed and an overview of recent legal developments related to capital punishment.

For some Supreme Court Justices and international courts, the extensive time that many inmates spend on U.S. death rows has raised concerns about cruel and unusual punishment.  In a recent dissent regarding the execution of Manuel Valle in Florida, Justice Stephen Breyer argued that Valle should not be executed because the 33 years he already spent on death row amounted to a violation of the Eighth Amendment.  In an earlier dissent in 1999, Justice Breyer noted that the Constitution did not foresee such delays, “Our Constitution was written at a time when delay between sentencing and execution could be measured in days or weeks, not decades.”  Justice Breyer’s concerns are in line with leading international legal opinion regarding the debilitating isolation common to death row.  Foreign courts have ruled that living for decades while facing execution is a form of psychological torment.  Sarah H. Cleveland, a Columbia law professor and former State Department official, said, “Although concerns about the human impact of excessive time spent on death row have received little attention in this country, the ‘death row phenomenon’ — including lengthy time on death row — has been recognized as inhuman punishment and illegal throughout Europe since the 1980s.”  In a 1993 opinion, the British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council wrote, “There is an instinctive revulsion against the prospect of hanging a man after he has been held under sentence of death for many years.” Justice Breyer concluded that a death penalty system that cannot be administered without long delays points to “the difficulty of reconciling the imposition of the death penalty as currently administered with procedures necessary to assure that the wrong person is not executed.”  While on the Court, Justice John Paul Stevens also expressed concerns about the cruelty of extended time on death row.