01 August 2019 :

USA - BJS Releases “Capital Punishment, 2017”. Death Penalty Continues to Wane in U.S. - Death row’s population down in 2017 for 17th straight year. Death row’s population declined for the 17th straight year in 2017, while the duration from sentence to execution increased to 20 years, three months, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reported Tuesday, continuing an overall drop in capital punishment across the U.S. The number of inmates under sentence of death fell by 94 to 2,703. An additional 59 federal inmates were on death row, up by one over 2016. The 23 executions in 2017 were half the number in 2010, although slightly more than the 20 carried out in 2016. Only 8 of the 32 states with capital punishment conducted executions in 2017; in May, New Hampshire abolished its death penalty. Even though the 34 new death sentences imposed in 2017 outnumbered the 23 executions, an additional 105 inmates left death row for other reasons. 21 died of natural causes, the bureau reported, 2 died by suicide and 1 died in a traffic accident. The data confirm that imposition of the death penalty is concentrated in a handful of states. Texas executed 7 inmates in 2017, followed by Arkansas with 4 and Alabama and Florida with 3 apiece. “Texas is still the big driver of all the execution activity, because Texas is the one state that puts a lot of people on death row and actually executes them,” said Lee Kovarsky, a law professor at the University of Maryland. Capital cases tend to be concentrated in larger counties in states with the death penalty, Mr. Kovarsky said. “You need a well-heeled county,” he said, because “it’s gotten so expensive to produce a death sentence and also to convert a death sentence into an execution.” The span between sentence and execution grew by 3 years, 3 months over 2016—and 7 years, 6 months from 2007.