When a Wake County jury decided late last month to spare the life of a man that prosecutors described as a “monster” and “cold-blooded serial killer,” death penalty opponents quietly hugged one another.
Samuel J. Cooper, 33, whom defense attorneys had portrayed as mentally scarred from years of physical and emotional abuse, would not join the 157 inmates on North Carolina’s death row. The killer, convicted by the same jury of five first-degree murders, would spend the rest of his life in prison without possibility of parole.
The sentence was a sign of changing times in North Carolina, one of 35 states where capital punishment is allowed – but used less and less frequently.
“You look at that case as a prosecutor and say, “If you can’t get the death penalty in that case, gee, what case are you going to get the death penalty in?”" said Jim Woodall, the district attorney in Orange and Chatham counties who also serves as president of the N.C. Conference of District Attorneys. “More and more, the climate is against trying capital cases; therefore, you have to have almost a perfect trial for it to be upheld.”
via Death penalty cases dwindle – Crime/Safety – NewsObserver.com.
A national physicians organization has quietly decided to revoke the certification of any member who participates in executing a prisoner by lethal injection.
The mandate from the American Board of Anesthesiologists reflects its leaders’ belief that “we are healers, not executioners,” board secretary Mark A. Rockoff said. Although the American Medical Association has long opposed doctor involvement, the anesthesiologists’ group is the first to say it will harshly penalize a health-care worker for abetting lethal injections. The loss of certification would prevent an anesthesiologist from working in most hospitals.
via Group to censure physicians who play role in lethal injections.
Something is afoot in America’s most “law-and-order” state. The number of people sent to death row is declining.
On Sept. 21, 2006, Juan Quintero, an undocumented Mexican national, was arrested after a routine traffic stop in Houston. The arresting officer, Rodney Johnson, frisked and cuffed Quintero, who was driving without a license, before placing him in the back seat of his patrol car. But Johnson missed the gun that Quintero had hidden on him. Moments later, as Johnson sat in the front seat writing up a report, Quintero fired seven times, killing the officer.
Johnson’s murder shocked Houston. But what happened afterwards may have been just as startling. Juries in Harris County (where Houston is located) were once notable for handing down death sentences. They stood out even in Texas, long a pro-death penalty state. During the 1990s the county sent more than a dozen convicted felons a year to death row—a larger number than some states—and currently accounts for more than a third of the inmates on Texas’ death row (106 of 332).
Nevertheless, Quintero received a life sentence following his trial in May 2008. Even his gruesome attack on a police officer did not alter the change of heart that has apparently transformed Houston from what anti-capital punishment advocates once dubbed the “capital of capital punishment” into a death-penalty-free zone.
It has, in fact, been more than two years since any Harris County jury has imposed a death sentence. The Quintero case, says Kristin Houlé, executive director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (TCADP) was a graphic demonstration that Texas is no longer ”so reliant on the death penalty.”
Statistics bear that out. Last year, the number of new death sentences handed down in Texas dropped to nine, the lowest number since the state revived the death penalty in 1976, and down from nearly 30 in 2003. That’s a remarkable contrast to the peak years in the late 1990s, when as many as 48 people a year would be sent to death row, according to the TCADP’s annual report on the state of Texas’ death penalty.
via The Crime Report » Archive » The Death Penalty in Texas: A Change of Heart?.
- Image by gnuru via Flickr
The United States, with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, has about one-quarter of its prisoners. As you noted, the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Over 2.4 million persons are in state or federal prisons and jails – a rate of 751 out of every 100,000. Another 5 million are under some sort of correctional supervision such as probation or parole (PEW 2008). The US remains the last of the post-industrial so-called First World nations that still retains the death penalty, and we use it often. Nearly 3,500 inmates await execution in 35 states and at the federal level. It was not until the early 21st century that the US abolished capital punishment for juveniles and those with IQs below 70.
During the past 40 years there has been a dramatic escalation in the US prison population – a ten-fold increase since 1970. Between 1987 and 2007 alone, the prison population nearly tripled. The rate of incarceration for women escalated at an even more dramatic pace. The increased rate of incarceration can be traced almost exclusively to the War on Drugs and the rise of lengthy mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug crimes and other non-violent felonies.
A similarly repressive trend has emerged in the juvenile justice system. The juvenile justice system has shifted sharply from its original stated goals of rehabilitation and therapy, into a “second-class criminal court that provides youth with neither therapy or justice” (Feld 2007). Throughout the 1990s, the federal government and nearly all states enacted a series of legislation that criminalized a host of “gang-related activities.” This lowered the age at which juveniles could be referred to adult court, widened the net of juvenile justice, and made it easier, and even mandatory in some cases, to try juveniles as adults.
Recently scholars, educators and activists have raised concerns about the growing connection between schools and the prison industrial complex. The growing pattern of tracking students out of educational institutions, primarily via “zero tolerance” policies, and tracking them directly and/or indirectly into the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems is variously referred to as the “school to prison pipeline,” the “schoolhouse to jailhouse track,” or as younger and younger students are targeted, the “cradle to prison track” (NAACP 2005; Advancement Project 2006; Children’s Defense Fund 2007). In part, the school to prison pipeline is a consequence of schools which criminalize minor disciplinary infractions via zero tolerance policies, have a police presence at the school, and rely on suspensions and expulsions for minor infractions.
t r u t h o u t | The Racialization of Crime and Punishment.
corrections, courts, critical criminology, critical legal studies, cultural criminology, death penalty, justice, law enforcement, prison industrial complex, reentry, war on drugs
Prisons. In 2008, there were 1.3 million sentenced pris- oners under the jurisdiction of states. An estimated 22% (301,331) of all prisoners were convicted of nonserious, nonsexual offenses.
The national average cost to incarcerate an offender for one year was $28,648. Collectively, states spent $39 billion in 2006 on state corrections, which includes prisons, parole, and juvenile justice.
Jails. In 2008, the average daily population of jails was 776,573. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 37% (288,109) of these were convicted. Of convicted jail inmates, 39% (112,362) were nonserious, nonsexual offenders. In 2006, the national average cost to house an offender in jail was $27,237 per year. Collectively, states spent $21 billion on local corrections, which includes jail and probation.
Cost savings of alternatives. In 2008, states spent $12.9 billion to incarcerate 80% (330,954) of nonserious, nonsexual offenders in prisons and jails. Alternatives are estimated to cost $3.2 billion. A total cost savings of at least $9.7 billion can be expected with implementation of alternatives.
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Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.
There were other important death penalty developments last year: the number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely. But not one of them was as significant as the institute’s move, which represents a tectonic shift in legal theory.
“The A.L.I. is important on a lot of topics,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “They were absolutely singular on this topic” — capital punishment — “because they were the only intellectually respectable support for the death penalty system in the United States.”
via Sidebar – Group That Shaped Death Penalty Gives Up on Its Own Work – NYTimes.com.
We’re Texas and we’re famously tough on crime. So how come we still have so much of it?
Numbers from recent years show Texas near the top in adults on probation or parole, prisoners in state correctional institutions, inmates under 18 in state prisons and (here's the punch line) crimes per capita.
Somehow, somewhere, we have been doing something wrong. And that adds up to an unsatisfactory return on what will be a $10.8 billion investment in public safety and criminal justice in the state’s 2010-2011 budget.
That’s almost 10 percent of state tax dollars. By comparison, 6.7 percent goes to business and economic development and 1.2 percent goes to natural resources.
The reality is that crime stats, more than being a measure of our success in fighting crime, are a measure of our failure in so many other areas.
via Criminal justice: Tough on crime? Check. Smart on crime? Not so much..
If the state stopped trying to execute killers, it would free up $11 million a year, according to a study by a Duke University economist published this month.
There is little return on the dollars spent on seeking the death penalty, says Philip Cook, an economist at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. Of the 1,034 people charged with murder in North Carolina in 2005 and 2006, prosecutors initially sought the death penalty against about a quarter of them. Only 11, though, were sentenced to death for their crimes.
“The idea that the state could spend so much money on someone they think is completely undeserving is very interesting,” Cook said. “I have to believe that there are some people that would find this cost issue irritating.”
via Study: End death cases, save money – Local/State – NewsObserver.com.
In the 1950s and through the 1960s and 70s, you had a huge number of revolutions going on. Colonized peoples were kicking the French out of Algeria, the U.S. out of Vietnam, and so forth, all over the world. Here at home, there were also the beginnings of a revolution: everything from the civil rights movement to the anti-war movement to groups like the Black Panthers getting together and saying “we’re not going to take this any more.” People around the world were trying to liberate themselves from the institutions of colonialism, racism, and capitalist oppression. In my view, the origins of the modern PIC emerge out of the contexts of those struggles. More specifically, I think that the origins of the modern PIC are in what we might call the counter-revolution: the reaction to these struggles.
I find it hard to accept arguments that suggest a lot of guys woke up one morning and said “hey, I have an idea, let’s be mean to black people,” and got all their friends on the phone and went into a smoke-filled room and got busy. And that black people were just walking around minding their own business and then all of the sudden they got snapped up in the dragnet. Especially because, the morning before, these guys were already being mean to black people.
I like to think about it this way: in the 1950s and 60s, there really were people struggling on radical and reformist fronts, struggling for example to get rid of American apartheid. People were fighting really, really, hard and dying a lot in this struggle. The problem that the U.S. faced was that even though they could demonize this or that little group, there was enough of a positive response to anti-racist or anti-colonialist struggle that the state couldn’t really contain it. They really didn’t know where it was going to go. There really was disorder in the streets – and not all of it was following a political agenda, not all of it was fleshed-out in many years of study groups. Some of it was spontaneous and erratic and some of it was spontaneous and really great. And so the state’s response was “what do we have? We lost Jim Crow. Culturally, we still have racism, so we don’t have to worry about it too much, but legally Jim Crow is no longer a weapon. What do we have left in the arsenal? Well, we have all the lawmaking that we can do. And we do have the cultural idea that there’s something wrong with ‘those people’: the colonized or the victims of apartheid.” During this time, we saw the conversation around race change from “they’re just not smart enough” to “they’re not honest enough.” “Crime” became the all-purpose explanation for the struggles and disorder that were going on.
via Recording Carceral Landscapes.
This is what passes for progress in the application of the death penalty: Kenneth Biros, a convicted murderer, was put to death in Ohio last week with one drug, instead of the more common three-drug cocktail. It took executioners 30 minutes to find a vein for the needle, compared with the two hours spent hunting for a vein on the last prisoner Ohio tried to kill, Romell Broom. Technicians tried about 18 times to get the needle into Mr. Broom’s arms and legs before they gave up trying to kill him. Mr. Biros was jabbed only a few times in each arm.
Ohio adopted the single-drug formula after the botched execution. It may well be an improvement over the three-drug cocktail, or may not. (Death penalty advocates who hailed it as less painful have no way, obviously, of knowing that.) But the execution only reinforced that any form of capital punishment is legally suspect and morally wrong.
via Editorial – There Is No ‘Humane’ Execution – NYTimes.com.
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