US death sentences, executions down sharply in '06

WASHINGTON, Dec 17: Experts say eroding support for capital punishment in America is a key reason death sentences have fallen to a 30-year low this year and executions have hit the lowest level in a decade.

The analysts, and capital punishment supporters and opponents, were reacting to the latest year-end report by the Death Penalty Information Center, a group that opposes the death penalty.

It found there were 53 executions in 2006, the lowest number since 1996 when there were 45 and well below the high of 98 executions in 1999. There were 114 death sentences this year, the lowest level in 30 years and down from nearly 300 each year in the 1990s.

Reasons for the declines include plunging murder rates, less public support for the death penalty and court rulings that outlawed executions of juvenile or mentally retarded criminals, the experts said.

''Support for the death penalty is on the decline and more people are embracing the alternative sentence of life without parole,'' said Richard Dieter, executive director of the information center.

''Capital punishment is risky, expensive and could result in irreversible error. Fewer people are now willing to put their faith in such a flawed policy,'' he said.

The decline in executions came as many states grappled with problems related to wrongful conviction and condemned inmates increasingly challenged the penalty, arguing lethal injection caused unnecessary and severe pain.

Florida's incoming governor said on Friday he would suspend executions after a medical examiner found that it took a condemned killer 34 minutes to die from a lethal injection because the needles were inserted improperly.

In California, a federal judge ruled on Friday that the state's method of execution using lethal injection was unconstitutional but could be fixed by changing the procedure.

James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston, said the drop in executions and death sentences partly reflected changes in attitudes and slipping public support for the death penalty.

WORRIES ABOUT POTENTIAL MISTAKES

''Even supporters of the death penalty are worried about the potential for mistakes,'' he said.

Fox cited the plunge in murders in the United States, with the homicide rate dropping nearly 50 percent between 1993 and 2000. ''When crime rates are low, like they are now, people are less apt to clamor for the death penalty,'' he said.

Another factor for the declines could be the Supreme Court's decision in 2005 that abolished the death penalty for juveniles and its ruling in 2002 that barred the execution of mentally retarded criminals, he said.

Kent Scheidegger, legal director of Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in California, said he calculated that about half of the decline in death sentences during the last 10 years resulted from declines in the U.S. murder rate.

He said the rest of the decline may reflect prosecutors and juries becoming more selective in death penalty cases and perhaps a decline in especially heinous murder cases warranting the death penalty.

Scheidegger said publicity about a fairly small number of exonerations, some of which were based on DNA evidence, also may have made some jurors more reluctant to impose the death penalty.

The report, which was released on Thursday, said the number of death-row inmates decreased for the fifth consecutive year after 25 years of increases, declining to 3,366 in 2006 from 3,415 last year.

If the litigation over the use of lethal injections is resolved, the number of executions could rise in 2007, the report predicted.

REUTERS