The Death Penalty Is a Terminal Patient

Nationally, the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center said in a separate report on Wednesday, the 28 executions so far in 2015, with no more scheduled, was the lowest number in the United States since 1991. At least 70 inmates with execution dates in 2015 received stays, reprieves or commutations.

The number of executions in the USA in 2015 is the lowest in almost 25 years, new figures reveal.

The study says the number of death-row inmates has fallen below 3,000 for the first time since 1995. The reports show that while the number of death sentences being imposed is plummeting, there still remain many condemned killers on death row whose appeals are exhausted or about to run out.

This year, six death-row prisoners were exonerated of all charges against them in the United States, one each in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and Texas, the report said.

“Montana, Virginia and Georgia did not sentence anyone to death this year”, he added, “and Texas only sentenced three people to death”. In a news release, the DPIC noted that “the use of the death penalty in the USA declined by virtually every measure” this year.

Other states eliminated the death penalty in 2015, including Nebraska, where the legislature overrode a governor’s veto to repeal it. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf imposed a moratorium on executions in that state, and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said she would extend a moratorium that has been in place since 2011.

The numbers mirror a gentle decline in death sentences over the past 15 years of time of time & a broad shift in public attitudes in that has made capital punishment more and more rare, stated Robert Dunham, the group’s executive director.

Since 1973, more than 150 people who had been sentenced to death have been exonerated after presenting evidence of their innocence.

This year, 28 executions have been performed, down from a 1999 peak of 98. Eighty-six percent of executions this year were concentrated in just three states: Texas (13), Missouri (6), and Georgia (5). Reduced public support generally tracks along with fewer death sentences, according to research conducted at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The annual report of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty records a steady decline. “People have become a lot more aware of some of the critical problems that persistently affect capital cases”, he said. Even Justice Antonin Scalia, a longtime defender of capital punishment, told an audiences this yr in that he would not be stunned if the courtroom invalidates the death penalty.

Texas continues to be the nation’s capital for executions.

The decline in the use of the death penalty stems from a combination of factors, including a large drop in violent crime between the late 1980s and early 2000s and the fact that all states with the death penalty now offer the alternative of life in prison without parole.

A Supreme Court decision in June let Oklahoma go forward with the execution despite the planned use of the chemical midazolam, a sedative that Glossip’s attorneys argued is ineffective at preventing a person from feeling pain, in its three-drug lethal injection cocktail.