Federal Death Penalty

Compared to the 1990’s, there has been a marked decline in death sentences in the U.S. since 2000. Every region of the country and every state that averaged one or more death sentences per year have seen a decline in the annual number of death sentences. The chart below compares the annual number of death sentences in each state in the 1990s with the 2000s. North Carolina, California, Florida, and Texas experienced the greatest declines in sentencing.  This issue and others are addressed in the Death Penalty Information Center’s Year End Report, released December 11, 2008.

The number of federal death sentences has increased in the past seven years, while the number of state death sentences has declined. The size of the federal death row has tripled since 2000, while the number of people on state death rows has dropped. There has also been a marked increase in the number of people on the federal death row from states that do not have their own death penalty laws.

Former U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton expressed relief that the Justice Department is no longer seeking to execute a defendant in the case that was cause for his termination. Charlton told the Associated Press that he did not think the government had sufficient evidence to pursue the death penalty in the prosecution of Jose Rios Rico. Charlton's boss, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, wanted him to pursue it anyway and testified to a Senate panel that he fired Charlton over his “poor judgment” in the case.

In “Confronting Evil: Victims’ Rights in an Age of Terror,” Prof. Wayne Logan of Florida State College of Law examines the use of victim impact evidence in mass-victim prosecutions, such as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the terrorist attacks of September 11. The article will appear in the forthcoming issue of the Georgetown Law Journal.  Victim impact evidence (VIE) is “information on decedents’ personal traits and the ways in which their deaths have adversely affected those left behind,” and it has been permitted in capital cases since the Supreme Court decision of Payne v.

Since the federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988, the state of New York has been more reluctant to impose death sentences than other states, according to the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project. New York federal prosecutors have asked juries to impose death sentences 19 times, but in only one of those cases did they vote for the death penalty. Nationally, federal prosecutors win death penalties in about 33% of cases.