Death Penalty Update

The execution of Clarence Hill in Florida on September 20th brought the total number of executions in the U.S. this year up to 43. Hill’s story is one of those that make you shake your head and wonder if you haven’t been transported through the looking glass.

In June the Supreme Court unanimously decided that Hill’s challenge to Florida’s lethal injection law on the basis of a civil rights violation was proper and should proceed. However, a district court in Tallahassee and an appeals court in Atlanta both refused to hear Hill’s suit saying that HE SHOULD HAVE FILED EARLIER! The Supreme Court then denied his request for a stay of execution by a vote of 5-4.

Let me make sure I understand this properly. In June the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously agreed that the man’s challenge was proper. In other words that he was entitled to have his day in court and be heard. However, this was denied by the lower courts because he filed his case too late and the same Supreme Court, that said his case should be heard, didn’t lift a finger to correct the fact that it had not been heard due to a filing deadline TECHNICALITY!

Just to further add to the Wonderland aspect of the whole thing is that the American Bar Association, three days prior to Hill’s execution, issued a report saying that Florida’s application of the death penalty fails to comply with ABA standards to ensure fairness and accuracy.

Among the problems cited in the report were the twenty-two Florida death row inmates exonerated since 1973, the fact that capital crime defense counsels were inadequately compensated, that there was juror confusion about the rules related to mitigating factors during the sentencing phase, that jurors did not have to arrive at a unanimous death penalty recommendation and that judges can overrule the jury’s recommendation and impose the death penalty which occurred in 166 of the 856 Florida death sentences from 1972 to 1999.

Well at least this time it wasn’t Texas looking ridiculous.

On the plus side of the ledger New Jersey continues to display indications that the death penalty is on the way out there. A state legislator from Cape May has announced that he has changed his mind and now opposes Capital Punishment which increases the majority in the legislature leaning toward abolition and the Asbury Park Press has published an editorial calling for replacing capital punishment with the sentence of life without parole.

There are twelve prisoners, including one woman on New Jersey's death row but the state has never executed anyone under its current death penalty statute.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund's "Death Row USA" for 2006 shows that the number of people on the death row in the United States is continuing to decline, falling to 3,366 as of July 1, 2006. The size of death row has been in a slow but steady decline since the year 2000.

Nationally, the racial composition of those on death row is 45% white, 42% black, and 11% latino. Of jurisdictions with more than 10 people on death row, Texas (69%) and Pennsylvania (70%) have the largest percentage of minorities on death row. Nearly 80% of the victims in crimes that resulted in executions were white.

California, with 657 inmates, and Texas, with 401 inmates, have the largest death row populations in the country. California has a judicial moratorium on executions in place due to problems with its lethal injection procedures but there’s nothing slowing down the death factory in Texas.

Maybe one day we’ll become as modern and sophisticated as countries like Liberia, Mexico and South Africa and realize how bad an idea capital punishment is.