The Death Penalty — Alive & Kicking

President Trump will leave his post as the most prolific execution president.

Jun 25, 2019

Last night Brandon Bernard was executed in Terre Haute, Indiana. He was pronounced dead at 9:27 p.m., becoming the youngest person in the United States to receive a death sentence in nearly 70 years.

Today, December 11, Alfred Bourgeois is scheduled to be executed.

In 2020, to date, the United States has carried out 16 executions:

7 at a state level
9 at a federal level

10 of those taking place in the last 5 months (9 federal executions, 1 state execution in Texas).

The United States plans to execute four more people, including Bourgeois, before Joe Biden is sworn in on January 20, 2021.

But for many Americans, the love affair with the death penalty is beginning to wane.

However, Attorney General Bill Barr and President Trump, the death penalty is very much alive and kicking.

Before July of 2020, the last federal execution was in March of 2003, when Louis Jones, Jr. was executed. In 2019, after lying dormant, Attorney General Barr wiped the dust off of the federal execution program. Starting in July of 2020, he began killing — with Trump’s robust support.

Federal versus State

There are currently a cumulative total of around 2,500 people on death row in the United States:

On the federal level:+/- 66 people
On a state level: +/- 2434 people

While the United States has determined that federal crimes can be prosecuted in any state or US territory, prosecutors may seek the death penalty. However, for those crimes that are not federal, then the death penalty is a state decision.

Of the fifty states:

25 states have the death penalty as a prosecutorial option.
22 do not have the death penalty.
3 have a governor imposed a moratorium.

The difference in the follow-through of the death penalty sentence between federal and state is vast:

For perspective, 46 federal executions have been carried out since 1927.
States have executed over 1,500 people since the death penalty was re-instates in 1976.

If the four remaining federal executions go off as planned, Donald Trump will secure his legacy as the most prolific execution president in 130 years.

History

The history of the death penalty is as old as civilization itself. Most records indicate that formal execution was a part of tribal justice systems. When corporal punishment, shunning, and banishment weren’t enough, the death penalty was the last resort.

Over the years, the practice of state-sanctioned murder has moved from things like the breaking wheel and the brazen bull to the guillotine to hanging to the firing squad to the electric chair to lethal injection.

In the case of one of our closest allies, Saudi Arabia, stoning is still a form of capital punishment.

Like most countries that exercise capital punishment, America reserves it for its most heinous crimes like murder, treason, terrorism, war crimes, and espionage.

However, historically, you could’ve been executed for anything from adultery, military desertion to buggery — at least in England (where buggery was written into law in 1533 and remained a capital offense until 1861.)

Of the countries that retain the death penalty, Amnesty International reports that 657 people were executed in 2019. This marks a 5% decrease from at least 690 executions recorded in 2018.

And this was down 60% from the 25-year-high total of 1,634 reported executions in 2015.

Although neither country reports such statistics, China and Iran are thought to be the world leaders in capital punishment. China, specifically, is suspected of executing over 1,000 of its citizens. Iran follows with 251, and then the numbers drop, with Saudi Arabia ranking third with 184 executions.

Amnesty International reports that America took the honor of being in sixth place in 2019 with 22 executions.

(Execution totals not known for Vietnam, North Korea, and Syria.)

Not a Deterrent.

Death penalty supporters like to talk about how it’s a crime deterrent. The data show something else entirely.

The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) has found conclusively that capital punishment does not disincentivize crime. The number of murders per 100,000 people in the United States has almost been cut in half since 1990 on its own.

In 2018, using statistics published by the FBI, the DPIC found that, since 1990, the murder rate for states that have the death penalty is 30% higher than those that do not.

Location, Location, Location

The south accounts for over 80% of executions while the northeast less than 1%. In fact, two states, Texas and Oklahoma, can boast 31% of the executions since 1976, with Texas being the “winner.”

Former President George W. Bush, as Governor of Texas, oversaw the execution of 154 people. Bush is only surpassed by the guy who took his place — Rick Perry. However, Bush was Governor for 5 years and Perry for 15.

George Bush — 5 years as Gov. of Texas, 154 executions, +/- 30 per year.
Rick Perry — 15 years as Gov. of Texas, 234 executions, +/- 15 per year.

Currently, 30 states have the death penalty on the books as a form of criminal punishment. Each state determines whether or not to use the death penalty.

Interesting to note is that while the state decides the legality of the death penalty, it is the counties within those states that drive the death sentence.

Since 1976, only 2% of counties IN AMERICA have been responsible for state-sanctioned executions.

That same 2% of counties are also responsible for:

52% of all executions that have taken place.
56% of death row inmates.

Gender and Race

Gender is typically not a factor in capital punishment. The sentence is predominantly meted out to men. As of 2018, 16 have been women have been executed since the death penalty was re-instated in 1976.

On the other hand, it won’t come as a shock that race plays a role. Nationally, the race of defendants executed typically vacillates. Some years being split down the middle between white and black men and others leaning heavily one way or the other.

A study by the Louisiana Law Review found that the odds of a death sentence were 97% higher for those whose victim was white than those whose victim was black.

According to a University of Washington study in 2014, juries are three times more likely to recommend a death sentence for a black defendant than for a white defendant in a similar case.

Another report by the American Bar Association found that in 96% of states where there have been reviews of race and the death penalty, there was a pattern of either race-of-victim or race-of-defendant discrimination …or both.

One such case is detailed in the second season of the podcast In the Dark. Curtis Flowers had been tried six times in Mississippi by District Attorney Doug Evans, who sought to execute Flowers for four murders in Winona, Mississippi, in 1996.

Each time Evans tried Flowers, he won.
Each time Flowers and his team would appeal, they’d win.

Finally, after the sixth trial, the appeal made its way to the Supreme Court who ruled in a resounding rebuke of Doug Evans by a vote of 7–2. SCOTUS ruled that Evans, the white district attorney, had violated Curtis’, a black man, constitutional rights by intentionally removing African-Americans from the jury at the sixth trial in 2010.

Flowers have since been freed, and the state has decided NOT to prosecute him for the seventh time.

Guilty until pronounced dead.

As science and technology have caught up with the law, it’s raised doubts about the certainty of guilt that both prosecutors and the public feel when they shout “Dead Man Walkin’!”

Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in Texas in 2004 for setting a fire that killed his three young daughters. While he had always claimed his innocence, the arson investigation used to convict him was questioned by leading experts before Willingham was executed.

Since 2004, further evidence in the case has led to the inescapable conclusion that Willingham did not set the fire for which he was executed.

In 2005, Georgia executed Brian Keith Terrell. Physical evidence from the crime scene leaves substantial questions about Terrell’s guilt: footprints found near the victim’s body were smaller than Terrell’s feet. None of the 13 fingerprints found by investigators matched his fingerprints.

Terrell was convicted primarily on the testimony of his cousin, Jermaine Johnson, who spent a year in jail facing the threat of the death penalty before he made a deal with prosecutors to testify against Terrell in exchange for a five-year sentence.

Brian Keith Terrell’s last words: “Didn’t do it.”

Then there is the information left out of the trial that could persuade a jury from execution. In 2001, North Carolina executed Ronald Wayne Frye. No one denied either his crime or its heinous nature. As his execution date approached, information about his upbringing came to light.

One piece of evidence the jury never got to hear was that Frye’s mother had given him and his brother away to a pair of strangers she met at a gas station when Frye was a young boy. The couple beat Frye and his brother with a bullwhip and forced the boys to beat each other as well.

If Frye’s story had been investigated by his attorney’s, they would’ve found resounding evidence of profound neglect and abuse.

This type of revelation led at least two jurors to announce that they would not have voted for the death penalty had they had been privy to that information. “A background of neglect and abuse would have changed my decision and my vote,” one juror said weeks before Frye’s execution.

Dollars and Sense

Death penalty supporters like to say that it actually saves money. At best, that statement is misleading because, here again, the data tell a different story.

According to research, enforcing the death penalty costs Florida $51 million a year above what it would cost to punish all first-degree murderers with life in prison without parole.

Not surprisingly, the majority of these costs occur at the trial level.

A 2014 study by the Kansas Judicial Council found that the defense costs for death penalty trials in Kansas averaged about $400,000 per case. Conversely, the cost was just $100,000 per case when the death penalty was not sought.

Texas has had 561 executions since 1976. In Texas, a death penalty case costs an average of $2.3 million. That’s about three times the cost of imprisoning someone in a single cell at the highest security level for 40 years.

Executions Up, Support Down

It’s unclear who still supports the death penalty here in the United States. According to the 2018 annual Gallup crime poll of U.S. adults, less than half of Americans (49%) believe the death penalty is fairly applied in the United States.

A 2010 poll by Lake Research Partners found that a clear majority of voters (61%) would choose any other punishment than the death penalty for murder.

Law enforcement doesn’t support it. A poll commissioned by Death Penalty Information Center found police chiefs ranked the death penalty last among ways to reduce violent crime. They also considered it the least efficient use of taxpayers’ money.

Even the bedrock of supporters of the death penalty, conservative Republicans, are rising against it.

In 2017, a report was issued that documents the Republicans heightened interest in repealing the death penalty. Conservative New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Tim Morris has gone so far as to call the death penalty a wasteful “big government” policy that is “inept, biased, and corrupt.”

Globally, America currently ranks seventh in its use of the death penalty. If the four remaining executions are carried out by January 20, President Trump will leave his post as the most prolific execution president.

There are currently over 2,500 people on death row in the United States. All the data indicates it’s not a deterrent; it’s morally and ethically dubious at best, financially unsound, we’ve executed innocent people, and it lacks the support of the population and much of law enforcement.

142 countries, more than 2/3 of the countries in the world, have abolished the death penalty.

Sadly, America is not one of them.

Why is the death penalty still taking place? What is it accomplishing? Executing citizens isn’t a way to show that you are tough on crime.

Like SO many topics in America today, the discussion around the death penalty is divisive. The divisiveness leads to inertia, and, as such, state-sanctioned murder continues.