Support for US executions seen waning

WASHINGTON -- Criminal justice specialists say eroding support for capital punishment in the United States is a key reason that 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, reacted last week to a year-end report by the Death Penalty Information Center, a group that opposes the death penalty.

The center 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.

The report was issued at a time when some forms of execution are coming under growing scrutiny because of pain they may cause.

Last week, executions by lethal injection were suspended in Florida and ordered revamped in California because of concerns that the procedures being used might not satisfy the constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

Reasons for the decline in the execution rate nationwide include falling murder rates, less public support for the death penalty, and court rulings that outlawed executions of juvenile or mentally retarded criminals, the analysts 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 that lethal injection caused unnecessary and severe pain.

Florida's outgoing Republican governor said 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.

Governor Jeb Bush ordered the suspension after it took a second injection to kill convicted murderer Angel Nieves Diaz. A state medical examiner said that needles used to carry the poison had passed through the prisoner's veins and delivered the three-chemical mix into the tissues of his arm.

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

Judge Jeremy Fogel of the US District Court for Northern California ordered the state to revise its procedures and consider eliminating the use of two drugs: pancuronium bromide, which causes paralysis, and potassium chloride, which causes cardiac arrest.

The executions have been effectively on hold since February while Fogel conducted a review, although the judge did not order a halt.

The report of the Death Penalty Information Center, which was released 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.

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.

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

Fox cited the sharp decline 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.

Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the 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 US 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.

Scheidegger said publicity about a 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.

Groups opposed to the death penalty have had increasing success arguing that the pain the drugs inflict inflicts is cruel and unusual punishment.