30-year low in '06 for death sentences

By Robert Tanner

Associated Press
Published January 5, 2007

The number of death sentences handed out in the United States dropped last year to the lowest level since capital punishment was reinstated 30 years ago, reflecting what some experts say is a growing fear that the criminal justice system will make a tragic and irreversible mistake.

Executions also fell, to the fewest in a decade.
"The death penalty is on the defensive," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington organization that looks at problems with the capital punishment system.

Death sentences declined to 114 in 2006, the group estimated. That is down from 128 in 2005 and from the 137 sentences the year after the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. It is also down sharply from the high of 317 in 1996.

Fifty-three executions were carried out in 2006, compared with 60 in 2005. Executions over the past three decades peaked at 98 in 1999.

Among the many causes cited by prosecutors, lawyers and death penalty critics: the passage of more state laws that allow juries to impose life without parole, an overall drop in violent crime and a reluctance among some authorities to pursue the death penalty because of the high costs of prosecuting a capital case.

But above all, many said, is the possibility of a mistake. Since the death penalty was reinstated, 123 people have been freed from Death Row after significant questions were raised about their convictions, 14 of them through DNA testing, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Thirty-seven of the 38 states that have the death penalty also allow for life without parole. Texas enacted such a law in 2005. Life-without-parole laws give another option to jurors who fear the death penalty is the only way to keep a killer from getting out on the streets again.

Illinois is in the seventh year of its moratorium on executions, and executions are effectively halted in New York because of a 2004 court ruling.

Also, questions about whether lethal injection is inhumane have put executions on hold in nine states--Arkansas, California, Delaware, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio and South Dakota--and in the federal system.

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