[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----MISS., NEB., COLO., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Sug. 9



MISSISSIPPI:

Prosecutor: Mississippi's longest-serving death row inmate 'had every 
opportunity to save his life'


Condemned killer Richard Gerald Jordan had his chance to live without fear of 
execution, but he blew it, the case's prosecuting attorney says, all because of 
greed.

"You know, he had his day in court," said Gulfport attorney Joe Sam Owen. Owen 
prosecuted the January 1976 kidnapping, robbery and execution-style killing of 
Gulfport banker's wife Edwina Marter for ransom. "Neither I ... nor the jury or 
anyone else put Richard Gerald Jordan where he is today.

"He did it himself.

"You know, greed is what prompted this thing to begin with and here it is 2015 
and he's still being greedy. He wants life without parole. He had every 
opportunity and he didn't accept it."

Owen served as special prosecutor on the case long after he'd left the Harrison 
County District Attorney's Office to go into private practice.

"You've got to take yourself back in time to the way things were back in 1976," 
he said. "In today's society, we see violent crime all the time. Unfortunately, 
we see both international and domestic terrorism. We have become desensitized 
to some extent.

"Back in 1976, this was really an outrageous, horrible crime and over the years 
it stuck with me. I knew Edwina Marter. I didn't know her personally, but I 
knew her. I'm a member of St. James Catholic Church and Edwina was a member of 
that church, or that parish. It sort of hit home with me."

A chance at life

Owen first took Jordan, now 68, to trial in 1976. A jury convicted Jordan of 
capital murder and sentenced him to death. Over the next 15 years, he would win 
appeal after appeal. But in the end he was resentenced to death.

In 1991, Owen said, Jordan had his chance to avoid execution when he agreed to 
a plea deal that gave him a sentence of life without parole. As part of the 
deal, Jordan signed a waiver saying he wouldn't appeal the sentence, but Owen 
didn't buy it and voiced his objections in court.

At the time of the plea deal, state law allowed only for a conviction of death 
or life with parole in a capital murder case and Owen knew that.

"We had a hearing and I objected to it," Owen said. "I said, 'You cannot do 
this. I said, 'There are Supreme Court decisions that say you cannot alter or 
amend a statutory sentence.'"

When the agreement was signed, Owen said he knew it was "as worthless as the 
paper it is written on."

"I knew Jordan had no intention of abiding by any agreement to waive appeal," 
he said. "I so voiced that concern. They went ahead and let him plead."

As Owen predicted, Jordan appealed his conviction, and the Supreme Court sent 
the case back to lower court for a new trial. Owen said he had no control over 
the then-district attorney's decision to accept the faulty deal.

A jury once again convicted Jordan and sentenced him to death.

Jordan would go on to accuse Owen of prosecutorial vindictiveness for seeking a 
death sentence in that trial because the state had earlier agreed to spare his 
life in the plea agreement granting him life without parole.

Multiple chances

"Richard Gerald Jordan had every opportunity to save his life and the classic 
example was in 1991 when the judge agreed and allowed him to plead to life 
without parole," Owen said. "There was his opportunity right there to save his 
life and he choose not to do that.

"You know, from a standpoint of human life, I do have problems with seeing 
someone put to death. I'm not one of those guys that think, 'Well, yes, I'd 
like to go up there and watch this guy suffer and die.'

"It still bothers me to some extent," he said. "I have feelings about it, but 
in my own mind I reconcile in such a way that this man has had every 
opportunity to save his life. And so now he feels like society has done him 
wrong or the judicial system has betrayed him. This guy, Mr. Jordan, in my 
opinion, gave new meaning to due process."

The Attorney General's Office has requested an execution date on or before Aug. 
27 for Jordan, Mississippi's longest-serving death row inmate, but that is on 
hold because of a lawsuit Jordan and another inmate have filed challenging the 
state's lethal injection protocol.

Jordan claims the drugs that are used could allow him to feel great pain. His 
attorney is arguing Jordan should not be put to death until a federal judge 
determines if the state's lethal cocktail is constitutional.

"We wouldn't be talking about whether or not his execution would be painful if 
he just hadn't lied to the judge, if he had just simply taken his (sentence of) 
life without parole," Owen said.

But, he added, "I don't know how you measure or balance out his death as being 
cruel and unusual between the backdrop of Edwin Marter's death, and the impact 
it had on her children, the fact that the 3-year-old doesn't even remember his 
momma, the trauma that (Edwina Marter's husband) Chuck Marter has lived through 
for 39 years, the time he's had to come back and testify in trial and listen to 
that tape recording between he and Jordan and the fact that he's just had to 
live this over and over again."

"The death penalty," Owen said, "... is appropriate in some situations, and I 
think this is one situation where it is appropriate."

The crime

Jordan kidnapped Marter, 34, on Jan. 12, 1976, from her home on Southern 
Circle.

Jordan, then 29 and a native of Hattiesburg, hatched his plans to kidnap 
someone for ransom long before he made the trip from Mansfiled, La., to 
Gulfport. On his way, he stopped at a pawn shop in Baton Rouge and traded his 
16-gauge shotgun for a .38 revolver that would later be identified as the 
murder weapon.

When he got to Gulfport, he spotted Gulf National Bank on U.S. 90, stopped at a 
convenience store across the street and called the bank asking to speak to the 
commercial loan officer. Charles Marter, a senior vice president, talked to 
Jordan, who pretended to be a businessman interested in a commercial loan. 
Marter told him to come by his office.

Jordan looked up the Marters' home address in the phone book, and about noon he 
drove there but didn't stop when he realized Charles Marter had come home for 
lunch.

Jordan returned later. He was wearing slacks, a tie and a sports coat and had a 
gun strapped to his thigh. He'd cut the lining out of his pants pocket so he 
could reach for his gun when he got inside the home.

Jordan knocked on a side door, and told Edwina Marter he was from General 
Electric and checking on circuit breakers because they'd had some complaints.

Edwina Marter let him in, and he pulled his gun. He ordered her to go with him.

Owen said Edwina Marter begged Jordan to let her stay with her 3-year-old son 
who was asleep inside, but he forced her to leave. They got down the road, but 
Jordan realized he'd left a folder he'd brought with him on a table at the 
house.

They returned, and then left again. He told authorities he made Edwina Marter 
drive -- though Owen still doubts that claim -- until they stopped on Turan 
Road in Harrison County.

Jordan, a certified marksman who had served in the Armed Forces, claimed Edwina 
Marter panicked and ran. He said he was trying to fire a warning shot but the 
bullet hit her in the back of the head and killed her.

The evidence, however, showed he killed her execution style, the shot fired 6 
to 8 inches from the back of her head.

After he killed her, Owen said, Jordan drove to a theater in Orange Grove and 
watched the movie "Death Wish." He later called Charles Marter demanding 
$50,000 in ransom for the safe return of his wife.

Eventually, the ransom demand dropped to $25,000. Jordan was arrested a short 
time after authorities first spotted him picking up the ransom on the shoulder 
of Interstate 10 at Canal Road.

Evading his captors

A vehicle chase followed, but Jordan was able to run his pursuers off the road.

He drove to a store in Gulfport and bought a new jumpsuit to wear. He kept some 
of the ransom on him and hid the rest in an abandoned car behind the business. 
And then he called for a cab to take him to the Twin Pines motel in Biloxi.

When he got in the cab, Jordan told the driver he wanted a ride to the Biloxi 
motel.

Owen recalls the cab driver unwittingly told Jordan they were going to have to 
take some back roads because "some fool has kidnapped a banker's wife."

Not long after that the cab was stopped in a roadblock, and Jordan was taken 
into custody. He confessed and told authorities where to find Edwina Marter's 
body, the murder weapon and the money.

Her sister, Mary DeGruy, said her family has waited long enough for justice.

"This has been going on far too long for us," she said.

(source: sunherald.com)






NEBRASKA:

Ex-prosecutor for Nebraska death penalty cases says he was told not to pursue 
executions ---- "I was in charge of a death penalty that wasn't going 
anywhere," said J. Kirk Brown, the former top death penalty prosecutor for the 
state.


The former top death penalty prosecutor for the state says there's a simple 
reason why Nebraska hasn't pursued any executions in recent years: because he 
was told not to.

J. Kirk Brown, who handled the state's capital punishment cases for more than 
30 years, said that 4 years ago he was told to not pursue steps to alter the 
state's lethal injection protocol so the state could have a legal means to 
carry out executions.

Because the state's existing protocol was being held up by court challenges, 
Brown said, "I was in charge of a death penalty that wasn't going anywhere."

"There was a decision that we aren't going to push the death penalty anymore. 
The decision was made not to move forward," he said. "Basically, in the last 3 
to 4 years I was in the office, nothing happened."

Brown, who retired a year ago, said he has no idea why an order to stand down 
on the death penalty was issued. He believes the order originated with the 
Governor's Office and was not something that would have been decided by the 
Attorney General's Office, where he worked, or the State Department of 
Correctional Services, which is responsible for carrying out death sentences.

Then-Gov. Dave Heineman and former Attorney General Jon Bruning, who have been 
vocal supporters of the death penalty, each declined to comment when asked to 
respond.

But in December, Bruning indicated in an interview with Nebraska Educational 
Television that it was Heineman's decision not to pursue a change in the 
state's lethal injection protocol. Bruning said that in retrospect he wishes 
the state would have pursued a change in the protocol, but said he didn't 
disagree with the governor at the time.

Former State Corrections Director Bob Houston, who said he considers Brown to 
be both credible and a good friend, declined to comment about the decisions 
that were made. ???I think I???ll let (Brown???s) comments stand on their 
own,??? he said.

In interviews with The World-Herald in January 2012 and October 2013, Bruning 
said the state might need to switch to a one-drug protocol because of legal 
challenges to the state's 3-drug system.

Then, in October 2014, he told The World-Herald that the state had been 
diverted from addressing the issue, in part because of the state prison 
sentencing fiasco.

Brown said his offer to contact his fellow death-penalty prosecutors in other 
states and pursue a change was rejected. At least 25 states have changed their 
protocols, or adopted backup methods, in an attempt to keep capital punishment 
viable.

The decision was made to legally defend the state's supply of lethal injection 
drugs even though, according to Brown, it was common knowledge that the supply 
would expire - and therefore be unusable - before the legal challenge was 
resolved.

The attorney said a change in protocol, which requires a public hearing and 
approval by the attorney general and governor, could have taken as little as 90 
days.

That, Brown said, would have allowed the state to request execution dates for 
notorious murderers such as Michael Ryan, convicted in the Rulo cult murders, 
and Carey Dean Moore, condemned for killing 2 Omaha cabbies.

Ryan died in May of salivary gland cancer, after spending nearly 30 years on 
death row. Moore, convicted in the 1979 killings, remains on death row.

"The reality is, the train just stopped," Brown said. "People said 'We support 
the death penalty, and we will seek the death penalty when we can,' but the 
reality was the choices we made left us in a position that we had a death 
penalty but we were not in a position to enforce it."

Brown's comments provide a rare insider's view of what was going on at the 
State Capitol in the waning years of the Heineman administration. The 
prosecutor's comments come amid a statewide debate over whether Nebraska should 
revive the death penalty, which was repealed by the State Legislature over a 
veto by Gov. Pete Ricketts.

A petition drive is underway to allow the state's voters to decide the fate of 
capital punishment at the ballot box, in the 2016 general election.

Ricketts and current Attorney General Doug Peterson have said the state is 
working to allow the importation of a new supply of lethal injection drugs, 
which federal officials have said they will not allow. Corrections officials 
have said they are not exploring alternative drugs or new execution protocols. 
So far this year, 18 executions have been carried out by 5 states that changed 
their protocols.

One of the chief arguments against the death penalty is that it represents a 
failed government policy because the punishment hasn't been used in Nebraska 
since 1997, due to legal challenges and hurdles to obtaining the lethal 
injection drugs.

The argument: "If you can't use the death penalty, why go through seemingly 
endless, and costly, rounds of court challenges?"

In 2009, the State Legislature changed the method of execution to lethal 
injection after the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that execution via the 
electric chair was cruel and unusual punishment, and therefore 
unconstitutional.

But problems arose soon after the change was implemented, and the state has 
never carried out a lethal injection execution.

In 2011, the state obtained an execution date for Moore, but the execution was 
called off after a legal challenge was filed over the quality of one of the 
lethal injection drugs, sodium thiopental, and whether the state had the 
authority to import it from India. The following year, after the state obtained 
a new supply of the drug, Ryan challenged it, claiming the sample was "stolen" 
and not intended for use in an execution.

The state eventually won in court, but by the time of the April 2014 ruling, 
the state's supply of sodium thiopental had expired.

In its 2014 ruling, Nebraska Supreme Court Judge William Connolly advised the 
state: "By simply altering its method of execution, the state can go forward 
with the sentence."

Brown, the state's former death penalty prosecutor, said he advised the same 
thing. But, he said, nothing was done about it.

Jerry Soucie, a defense attorney who challenged the state's supply of lethal 
injection drugs, said he felt it was "an odd approach" for the state to fight 
his lawsuits but not pursue an alternative protocol, which would have rendered 
his legal challenges moot.

"I never saw Brown and Bruning as being on the same page," Soucie said.

The death penalty was central to Brown's career.

He was the state's attorney of record, under then-Attorney General Don 
Stenberg, for the last three executions that Nebraska has carried out: Harold 
Lamont Otey in 1994, John Joubert in 1996 and Robert Williams in 1997.

Prior to that, Brown spent 6 years as general counsel for the corrections 
system in Texas, where he witnessed more than 20 executions.

A graduate of the University of Nebraska College of Law, Brown has lectured 
nationally that for the most heinous murders, the death penalty is justified.

But it's clear that there was a personnel clash within the Attorney General's 
Office prior to Brown's retirement a year ago. He was named solicitor general 
in 2003, an apparent promotion, during a reorganization of the office by 
Bruning. But around 2011 or 2012, when Brown said he was told not to pursue 
alternatives to the state's lethal injection protocol, he was ordered, in an 
email, to halt any communications with the Corrections Department. Later, he 
was stripped of the solicitor general title.

Stenberg, Brown's former boss and now Nebraska's state treasurer, said he has 
no firsthand knowledge of the state's recent strategic decisions about the 
death penalty.

But Stenberg said that when he was attorney general, his office was "very 
aggressive" in pursuing dates for executions, because that kept the cases from 
stalling in the courts.

Brown said the state couldn't ask for execution dates because it didn't have a 
viable way to carry out an execution.

Said Stenberg: "If the Attorney General's Office isn't aggressive in getting 
execution dates set, isn't objecting to appeals, nothing will ever happen."

Stacy Anderson, who recently left her post as director of Nebraskans for 
Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said she had "heard rumblings" that the 
state had put a hold on trying to revive capital punishment, but was unable to 
confirm that.

Former State Sen. Danielle Conrad, a leading opponent of the death penalty who 
now heads the ACLU of Nebraska, said she was not aware of any hold put on 
capital punishment, but she could understand if that happened.

Any new protocol, with new lethal injection drugs, would have spawned a new 
round of litigation and delays, Conrad said.

"There is no clear solution going forward that is all of a sudden going to make 
the death penalty work," she said.

Even if the petition drive is successful, and voters restore capital 
punishment, Conrad said it won't revive the death penalty, because of the 
barriers to obtaining the necessary drugs.

For his part, Brown said he has no idea why the decision was made, only that it 
was.

"Most mysteries, I can come up with a theory on why that made sense to me," he 
said. "This one hangs in the air. Sort of like the Bermuda Triangle."

(source: omaha.com)






COLORADO:

Victims' families shocked by James Holmes escaping death penalty----Holmes 
faces life in prison for killing 12 in Dark Knight cinema rampage


The families of James Holmes's victims have reacted with shock and anger after 
a judge announced on Friday that he would not receive the death penalty.

Holmes, 27, was convicted last month of carrying out a rampage that left 12 
people dead in an Aurora, Colorado cinema in 2012.

"He's still living and breathing," said Robert Sullivan, grandfather of 
Holmes's youngest victim, 6-year-old Veronica Moser-Sullivan. "Our loved ones 
are gone."

Throughout the trial, witnesses recounted the scenes of horror after Holmes 
entered the cinema during a showing of The Dark Knight Rises, detonated several 
smoke canisters, and began firing into the crowd. In addition to killing 12, 
Holmes wounded 70 people.

Holmes's fate was placed in the hands of 12 jurors, with life imprisonment 
guaranteed if they could not unanimously agree that he should be killed for his 
crimes.

Holmes was emotionless as Judge Carlos Samour read out the jury's decision on 
Friday.

"We the jury do not have a unanimous final sentencing verdict on this count," 
Judge Samour read. "And we the jury understand that as a result the court 
imposes a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole."

A relative of 1 victim reportedly stormed out of the courtroom before Judge 
Samour had even finished reading the jury's decision.

Another suggested that the jury had been "infiltrated" by a death penalty 
opponent.

1 juror said anonymously that 9 members had voted in favour of the death 
penalty, 2 were unsure, while 1 juror was adamantly opposed to issuing a death 
sentence for Mr Holmes.

Nicholas Metz, Aurora's police chief, was dismayed by the decision.

"There will never be closure for these families, for these victims," he said. 
"They will carry the scars. They will carry the pain."

Many of the relatives were frustrated that the prosecution had elected to 
pursue the death penalty despite Holmes's lawyer saying before the trial that 
he was willing to plead guilty if the death penalty was taken off the table.

That led to a 2-year process which culminated on Friday.

Jordan Ghawi, whose sister Jessica was killed, took to Twitter to express his 
disappointment.

"This trial should have never happened. Defense offered a plea to life in 
prison, but political ambition trumped reason," he wrote.

(source: The Telegraph)






USA:

Juror outraged by claims of jury misconduct in 2006 trial of Alfonso Rodriguez


A juror who helped convict and sentence to death the man who raped and killed 
Dru Sjodin is indignant over apparent allegations of juror misconduct the 
defense is making in its appeals aimed at sparing Alfonso Rodriguez Jr. from 
execution.

Rebecca Brandt Vettel, 1 of the 5 men and 7 women on the jury in the 2006 
trial, wants to know what the defense claims they did wrong.

"What are you saying about this awesome group of people who had nightmares, 
lost relationships and lost lives?" Brandt Vettel said in an interview Friday.

Brandt Vettel plans to take off work and drive from Bismarck to Fargo next 
month to attend Rodriguez's habeas corpus hearing in U.S. District Court, even 
though she might not get the chance to observe the arguments. Rodriguez's 
attorneys have asked Judge Ralph Erickson to consider a "temporary and partial 
closure" of the hearing.

Defense attorneys are expected to address at the Sept. 8 hearing their claims 
that there was juror misconduct in the trial, in which Rodriguez was found 
guilty of the 2003 murder of Sjodin, a University of North Dakota student 
abducted from a mall in Grand Forks, N.D.

Much of the court documentation that lays out the details of their allegation 
is sealed, unavailable for public review.

During the proceedings, jurors suffered through distressing and sometimes 
graphic photos and descriptions of how Rodriguez kidnapped the 22-year-old 
Sjodin at knifepoint from the Columbia Mall in Grand Forks, forcing her into 
his car and driving her across the border.

There, the twice-prior convicted sex offender restrained, raped, stabbed and 
strangled Sjodin before dumping her half-undressed body in a frozen Minnesota 
field, where it wasn't discovered until after the spring thaw.

The highly publicized case drew intense attention, and Sjodin's murder is 
credited with leading to increased scrutiny of sex offenders in the region. It 
remains the only federal death penalty case ever prosecuted in North Dakota, a 
state where no death sentenced had been handed down since 1914.

Since the trial, many jurors in the case have kept in contact. One of them, an 
older woman, has died. A younger male juror has died by his own hand, Brandt 
Vettel said.

It's inconceivable that any of her fellow jurors could have played fast and 
loose with court rules enjoining them from discussing the case and consuming 
news coverage during the trial, Brandt Vettel said.

She recalled asking motel workers where they were staying to move the newspaper 
dispenser from the front lobby, so she could avoid headlines about the previous 
day's proceedings.

Each juror reached a decision on the death penalty based on his or her own 
independent analysis, Brandt Vettel said. Nor were there strong death penalty 
advocates or opponents flogging an agenda on the jury, she said.

The misconduct claim diminishes the hard work and deep consideration each 
member put into sending Rodriguez to death row, and the long drawn-out nature 
of the appeals process prolongs the pain for both Sjodin's family, and for 
Rodriguez's, she said.

"What makes me angry is the whole stupid process. ... I said this from day 
one," Brandt Vettel said. "I did not put him there. He put himself there. We 
just made it legal."

(source: Grand Forks Herald)

***************

There's no evidence that death penalty is a deterrent against crime


Capital punishment is such a costly, controversial, and divisive issue that, 
unless it succeeds in saving lives, it clearly should be abolished - as it 
already has been in the European Union and in 101 countries around the world 
But does the death penalty save lives? Let's consider the relevant factors and 
the evidence.

Some feel the question of whether the death penalty deters can be argued as a 
matter of theory: capital punishment is worse than other penalties therefore it 
must lead to fewer killings. This contention misses much of the complexity of 
the modern death penalty. First, theory can???t tell us whether the spectacle 
of state-sanctioned killings operates to unhinge marginal minds into thinking 
that their own grievances merit similar forms of retribution that they then try 
to inflict on their own. Even if some other criminals were deterred by the 
death penalty, one must ask whether these avoided crimes would be more than 
offset by the possible brutalisation effect.

2nd, operating a death penalty regime - at least in the United States - has 
been incredibly costly, as each case resulting in a death sentence will spend 
years in various types of legal appeals, eating up the valuable time of judges, 
prosecutors, and defence lawyers, overwhelmingly at government expense.

The best research on the issue suggests that life imprisonment is a less costly 
penalty, since locking someone up is far less expensive than both locking them 
up and paying a team of lawyers for many years - often decades - to debate 
whether a sentence of death should be imposed. In California, for example, 
execution is only the third leading cause of death for those on death row 
(behind old age and suicide).

Some might contend that the lengthy appeals are a needless burden that should 
be jettisoned so that the penalty is administered more cheaply and quickly, but 
the large number of exonerations of those on death row (155 including 21 by DNA 
evidence at last count) underscores the danger of any effort to short circuit 
the judicial process. Killing a few innocent defendants is an unavoidable 
consequence of having a capital regime - so unless there is some clear evidence 
of deterrence, it is hard to argue positively for the death penalty.

Lack of evidence

So what is the evidence on deterrence? Here the answer is clear: there is not 
the slightest credible statistical evidence that capital punishment reduces the 
rate of homicide. Whether one compares the similar movements of homicide in 
Canada and the US when only the latter restored the death penalty, or in 
American states that have abolished it versus those that retain it, or in Hong 
Kong and Singapore (the first abolishing the death penalty in the mid-1990s and 
the second greatly increasing its usage at the same), there is no detectable 
effect of capital punishment on crime. The best econometric studies reach the 
same conclusion.

A number of studies - all of which, unfortunately, are only available via 
subscripton - purported to find deterrent effects but all of these studies 
collapse after errors in coding, measuring statistical significance, or in 
establishing causal relationships are corrected. A panel of the National 
Academy of Sciences addressed the deterrence question directly in 2012 and 
unanimously concluded that there was no credible evidence that the death 
penalty deters homicides.

The report went on to say that the issue of deterrence should be removed from 
any discussion of the death penalty given this lack of credible evidence. But 
if the deterrence argument disappears, so does the case for the death penalty.

Troy Davis was executed in Georgia in September 2011. World Coalition Against 
the Death Penalty, CC BY .

Those familiar with criminal justice issues are not surprised by the lack of 
deterrence. To get the death penalty in the United States one has to commit an 
extraordinarily heinous crime, as evidenced by the fact that last year roughly 
14,000 murders were committed but only 35 executions took place.

Since murderers typically expose themselves to far greater immediate risks, the 
likelihood is incredibly remote that some small chance of execution many years 
after committing a crime will influence the behaviour of a sociopathic deviant 
who would otherwise be willing to kill if his only penalty were life 
imprisonment.

Any criminal who actually thought he would be caught would find the prospect of 
life without parole to be a monumental penalty. Any criminal who didn't think 
he would be caught would be untroubled by any sanction.

Wasted resources

A better way to address the problem of homicide is to take the resources that 
would otherwise be wasted in operating a death penalty regime and use them on 
strategies that are known to reduce crime, such as hiring and properly training 
police officers and solving crimes.

Over the past 3 decades there has been a downward trend in the number of 
murders that lead to arrest and conviction to the point that only about 1/2 of 
all murders are now punished. The graphic below shows the steady decline in the 
number of homicides cleared by arrest in Connecticut, which mimics the national 
trend. Of course, even if there is an arrest, there may not be a conviction so 
the percentage of killers who are punished is smaller than this figure 
suggests.

Murder cases cleared by arrest or other means: 1970 - 2009 John Donohoe, Author 
provided.

Far better for both justice and deterrence if the resources saved by scrapping 
the death penalty could be used to increase the chance that killers would be 
caught and punished - and taken off the streets.

To give a sense of the burden of capital punishment, note that over the past 35 
years the state of California spent roughly $4 billion to execute 13 
individuals. The $4 billion would have been enough to hire roughly 80,000 
police officers who, if appropriately assigned, would be expected to prevent 
466 murders (and much other crime) in California - far more than any of the 
most optimistic (albeit discredited) views of the possible benefits of capital 
punishment.

In other words, since the death penalty is a costly and inefficient system, its 
use will waste resources that could be expended on crime-fighting measures that 
are known to be effective. It is not surprising that last summer a federal 
judge ruled that California's capital regime is unconstitutional on the grounds 
that it serves no legitimate penological interest.

The sharp decline in executions in the US from the peak of 98 in 1999 down to 
35 last year (with death sentences falling from a 1996 peak of 315 to 73), 
coupled with the steady pace of states abolishing the death penalty over the 
past 8 years (including conservative Nebraska in May) shows that "smart on 
crime" entails shunning capital punishment.

With zero evidence that the death penalty provides any tangible benefits and 
very clear indications of its monetary, human, and social costs, this is one 
programme about which there can be little debate that its costs undeniably 
outweigh any possible benefits.

(source: John Donohue ---- C Wendell and Edith M Carlsmith Professor of Law at 
Stanford University; The Conversation)