[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----COLO., NEV., CALIF., USA

[Rick Halperin]

July 18



COLORADO:

James Holmes real trial begins: To kill or not to kill the mentally ill----You 
can't execute a minor. You can't execute someone with a sufficiently low IQ. 
How does mental illness fit into that equation?


Now that James Holmes has been found guilty of the terror that he brought to 
the Aurora theater that night 3 years ago, the real trial begins, in which the 
jurors decide whether Holmes lives or dies.

No one can be surprised by the guilty verdict in a trial in which the testimony 
was so often so heartbreaking. The mass murders were not only an offense 
against the victims and their families, but also an offense against an entire 
community.

And in any case, the question wasn't whether Holmes had done the unthinkable. 
He had admitted he had. The question put to the jury was only whether Holmes 
was legally sane when he did the unthinkable. It was clear from the start how 
this phase of the trial would end. Whether the testimony actually showed him to 
be sane or insane, Holmes would inevitably be found sane enough. And so he was.

This verdict was not about expert testimony or about the ramblings in a 
notebook or about the hours of psychiatric interviews or about Holmes' strange 
- yes, crazy - ideas about gaining "value" from killing others. Holmes said 
himself he knew right from wrong. Philosophers have trouble with that concept. 
It's no wonder when juries do.

But now the certainty ends, and the question changes. It also gets tougher.

Because whether or not Holmes was legally sane - and the verdict won't end 
those arguments - he is clearly mentally ill. There seems to be no argument 
about that. Psychiatrists testifying for the prosecution and for the defense 
agreed, most putting him somewhere on the schizophrenia spectrum. We assume all 
mass murderers are not normal, but a diagnosis of schizophrenia makes it 
official.

The penalty phase of the trial could last as long as a month, and we will 
doubtless hear about Holmes' long struggle with mental problems. And so the 
question for the jury, and for the rest of us, will be: Should we execute a 
mentally ill killer in Colorado?

That's a much different question than determining guilt or innocence. And in 
this, where the facts were not in dispute, it's a much harder question. What 
are the rules, legal or moral or otherwise? What level of sanity is sanity 
enough? The same jury that determined that Holmes was legally sane - a 
so-called death-qualified jury, meaning the jurors have agreed they're willing 
to impose the ultimate penalty - will also make that decision.

Before we go any further, I should say that I'm opposed to capital punishment 
in all cases. This hardly makes me a radical. The state of Nebraska, where 
you're hard pressed to even find a liberal, has just banned capital punishment. 
The state of Pennsylvania, where 185 prisoners are currently on death row, is 
sufficiently ambivalent about the punishment that it hasn't executed anyone 
since 1999.

As I wrote after the Nebraska legislative vote, capital punishment can't long 
survive without certainty, and it's pretty obvious how uncertain we are on this 
issue. Barack Obama is said to be "evolving" on capital punishment, meaning we 
could see some executive action on federal death penalty cases. The polls, 
which not so long ago showed 80 % of Americans favoring the death penalty, are 
now closer to 50 % if life without parole is given as an option.

When the case of the botched Oklahoma execution of Clayton Lockett went to the 
Supreme Court, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a 40-page dissent saying that it 
was time to look again at the death penalty as cruel and unusual punishment. 
"The arbitrary imposition of punishment," he wrote, "is the antithesis of the 
rule of law."

The arbitrary argument is easily made. Most executions come from just a few 
states and, in most cases, from only a few districts in those few states. This 
is the definition of arbitrary: There were, by 1 account, 35 executions last 
year as opposed to nearly 15,000 murders.

In Colorado, there has been only one execution since the Supreme Court 
reinstated the death penalty in 1976. John Hickenlooper's controversial 
reprieve of Nathan Dunlap - made as Hickenlooper also evolved on capital 
punishment - became an issue in the gubernatorial race, but obviously not a 
decisive one.

But what comes next in the Holmes case could be decisive. The Supreme Court has 
put limits on the death penalty. You can't execute a minor. You can't execute 
someone with a sufficiently low IQ. How does mental illness fit into that 
equation? It may take many years of appeals to find out.

If a death-qualified jury were to decide that life without parole is the proper 
punishment for a mass murderer, that could change the course of the death 
penalty in Colorado. That is probably a long shot, though. In liberal 
Massachusetts, where they banned the death penalty 3 decades ago, Boston 
Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death in federal court by a 
death-qualified jury. That's despite the fact that a Boston Globe poll showed 
that only 15 % of Bostonians favored death.

Of course, that was a terrorism case. In the Holmes case, the motive is not so 
easily explained. If jurors decide that the explanation is, in large part, that 
Holmes may be legally sane but still mentally ill, what do they do? What should 
they do?

(source: Mike Littwin, The Colorado Independent)






NEVADA:

Court overturns death penalty for Pershing County killer


A federal appeals court has ruled that a Pershing County killer was wrongly 
sentenced to death because of a flawed jury instruction during the penalty 
hearing.

The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted a writ of habeas corpus in 
favor Mark Rogers, who killed 3 people in December 1980. This is the 7th appeal 
he has filed through the state and federal court system.

After his conviction in 1981, the jury found the murders involved depravity of 
mind as an aggravating circumstances that justified the death penalty.

The appeals court Friday upheld Senior District Judge Edward Reed Jr.'s 
decision that the instruction was unconstitutionally vague. It ordered a new 
penalty hearing or to impose a non-death penalty sentence.

It's been nearly 35 years since the killing of Emery and Mary Strode and 
daughter Meriam Strode in the couple's home in a remote part of Pershing 
County. Emery was shot 3 times and stabbed twice. Mary was shot once and 
stabbed once. Meriam was tied up with an electric cord and shot once in the 
back.

The state district court and the Nevada Supreme Court each twice rejected the 
appeals of Rogers.

A month after the murders, Rogers was arrested in Florida. At trial Rogers 
maintained he was mentally ill including bouts of psychotic paranoid delusions 
schizophrenia and psychosis.

The appeals court said the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 1 year before the Pershing 
County trial that the depravity of mind instruction was vague and should not be 
given to the jury.

(source: Las Vegas Sun)






CALIFORNIA:

Death penalty upheld for man who killed Fullerton couple


A federal appeals court has affirmed the death penalty sentence of Richard 
Delmer Boyer, who was convicted in 1992 for killing a couple during a robbery 
in their Fullerton home.

A jury on June 24, 1992, found Boyer guilty of murdering Francis Harbitz, 67, 
and Aileen Harbitz, 68, in December 1982.

Boyer admitted he went to the Harbitzes' home on the day of the murders, but he 
claimed he did not intend to kill them. Instead, he contended, he snapped under 
the influence of drugs and alcohol after Aileen Habitz offered him something to 
eat, and Francis Harbitz, who suffered from arthritis and walked with a cane, 
greeted him.

Boyer repeatedly stabbed and bludgeoned the couple, washed the knife and took 
their wallets.

Boyer's case has also been affirmed by the California Supreme Court.

(source: Orange County Register)






USA:

Holmes to have limited mental health options----Specialists say psychiatric 
care poor in prisons


Whether James Holmes gets life without parole or a death sentence for the 
Colorado theater shooting, he will spend years behind bars, joining about 6,000 
inmates in Colorado and hundreds of thousands of others nationwide who suffer 
from mental illness.

Specialists say prisons are ill-equipped to treat the growing number of inmates 
with mental illnesses, including the majority who are not convicted of crimes 
as violent as Holmes, who was diagnosed with a form of schizophrenia.

A jury on Thursday convicted the 27-year-old former neuroscience graduate 
student of murder and other charges for his 2012 assault at a midnight 
screening of a Batman movie that killed 12 and wounded dozens of others.

The same jurors will decide his sentence in the penalty phase of the trial, 
which starts Wednesday and will take about a month. Even if they decide Holmes 
should be executed, as prosecutors want, he would spend years in prison as his 
mandatory appeals play out in court.

Holmes pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but jurors rejected the claim 
after two state-appointed psychiatrists testified he could distinguish right 
from wrong, Colorado's test for sanity.

But the 2 state psychiatrists and two defense psychiatrists agreed he suffers 
from mental illness.

If jurors had found Holmes was insane, he would have been committed 
indefinitely to a state mental hospital. Instead, he could end up at the San 
Carlos Correctional Facility, Colorado's 250-bed prison for inmates with mental 
illness, where specialists agree his treatment will be at a far lower standard 
than if he were hospitalized.

"In most hospitals, you don't have staff whipping out Tasers and pepper spray 
and using it on their patients," said Jamie Fellner of Human Rights Watch, who 
has studied mental health treatment in prisons and recently wrote a report 
detailing instances of mentally ill prisoners being beaten or so violently 
restrained that they die. "This kind of treatment isn't just restricted to 
someone who's committed a horrific crime." Last year, Colorado's Department of 
Correction approved a $3 million settlement to resolve a lawsuit from a family 
of an inmate with a form of schizophrenia who died after being restrained in 
the San Carlos prison. Staffers were videotaped joking as Christopher Lopez 
suffered seizures and died. The agency said it fired 3 people.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections said no one was available to 
comment Friday on the prison system's mental health care.

People with mental illness sometimes wind up in jail because law officers don't 
know what else to do with them, said Scott Glaser, executive director of the 
Colorado chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

And once in the criminal justice system, they find it hard to get out.

"They cannot usually get effective treatment," Glaser said. "It increases 
recidivism. If someone is dealing with a mental illness that affects their 
decision-making. It's very easy for them to end up in the system again."

Nationwide, a 2006 federal study estimated that 56 % of all prisoners in state 
custody suffered from mental illness and 15 % suffered from some sort of 
psychotic disorder. Mental health advocates say their treatment is almost 
uniformly substandard for a variety of reasons.

Mentally ill people do not fare well in the crowded, loud environment of 
prisons, the study concluded. They are more likely to have trouble following 
rules, which makes them more likely to be punished and end up in solitary 
confinement.

The isolation of a solitary cell can vastly aggravate their mental illness. 
They are also more likely to be victims of sexual abuse, the study said.

Colorado lawmakers banned solitary confinement for inmates with serious mental 
illness after a prisoner who had been held in solitary for much of his 8-year 
term was suspected of killing the state prisons chief, Tom Clements, in 2013.

"Prison is a pretty horrific place to be, especially if you have a mental 
illness," said Laura Usher of the National Alliance on Mental Illness' national 
office.

The incarceration of mentally ill inmates in jails and prisons has been a 
persistent national problem since the widespread closure of mental hospitals in 
the 1970s.

A local community care system to handle the newly released mentally ill never 
materialized, and now they often end up behind bars. There the Constitution 
entitles them to basic medical treatment, said Dr. Renee Binder, president of 
the American Psychiatric Association, but it's often hard to meet that 
standard.

The APA and other groups are pushing for more programs to keep the mentally ill 
out of prison initially - be it those special courts or local treatment.

"When someone ends up in jail and prison and has a serious mental illness, it's 
really a problem with the system," Binder said. "The question needs to be 
asked: 'Could we have prevented this?'"

(source: Associated Press)

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

Question sanity of death penalty


The verdict is in, and James Holmes has been found guilty of 1st-degree murder 
for killing 12 people in a movie theater in July 2012. The Colorado jury 
predictably rejected his insanity defense, but that is not the end of the 
story. That same jury will now begin determining whether he should be executed 
or serve the rest of his life in prison. And, as a result, America once again 
finds itself in a virtually unique discussion among rich nations on whether 
capital punishment should apply to one of its citizens.

As a former law enforcement officer, former prosecutor, criminal lawyer, and 
continuing real-world "student" of criminology, I've seen up close the evidence 
suggesting that the United States should not be having this conversation 
anymore, because it may be time to put an end to capital punishment completely.

This is not because I have any moral objection to executing the worst of the 
worst -- those who murder innocent victims, sometimes in the most horrific ways 
imaginable. It is hard to see capital punishment as particularly "cruel" or 
"unusual" when the victims will often have died much worse deaths than the 
killer will be subjected to. But the fact is that there are several practical 
reasons why the death penalty just doesn't make sense any longer, if it ever 
really did in the first place.

1. Executions are actually less punitive than life without parole. I've never 
been to prison, but having dealt regularly with prisoners, it's clear that 
prison life is hard -- very hard. And you don't have to take my word for it. 
Recently executed murderer David Zink had this to say about it just before his 
death by lethal injection in Missouri:

"For those who remain on death row, understand that everyone is going to die. 
... Statistically speaking, we have a much easier death than most, so I 
encourage you to embrace it and celebrate our true liberation before society 
figures it out and condemns us to life without parole and we too will die a 
lingering death."

This point of view is not surprising when you look at the Supermax prison in 
Colorado, which some have described as a fate worse than death. There, inmates 
typically spend 23 hours a day locked inside a cell, with little communication 
with other inmates or the outside world. There are also state versions of these 
facilities, which the New York City Bar Association has labeled as cruel and 
unusual punishment, likening imprisonment in one as torture under international 
law.

2. Death penalty litigation makes no financial sense. Numerous studies have 
found that death penalty criminal litigation costs taxpayers far more than 
prosecutions seeking life without parole. For example, in Colorado, where the 
Holmes jury now has to spend the next several weeks hearing evidence, the state 
will shell out approximately $3.5 million, as opposed to an average of $150,000 
if the state had not sought the death penalty, according to the American Civil 
Liberties Union.

Why? Because the average length of the initial prosecution for a death penalty 
case -- not including lengthy appeals -- means more than 1000 extra days of 
courtroom resources are being used. Judges, prosecutors, public defenders, 
court reporters, jurors, bailiffs and other courtroom staff are all needed just 
to conduct a trial, and that means spending a lot of money from state coffers 
that could have been used elsewhere. In Colorado's case specifically, the state 
has executed exactly one person since 1976, when the Supreme Court of the 
United States lifted the moratorium on capital punishment in the landmark 
ruling of Gregg v. Georgia. So is this punishment phase of the Holmes trial 
really necessary? Only time will tell, but the fact remains that Colorado has 
historically been hesitant, to say the least, to execute murderers.

3. Death penalty litigation is harder on families of murder victims. Death 
penalty cases on average take 25 years or so to reach ultimate resolution, 
whether it be the imposition of the death sentence, a reversal or otherwise. As 
such, family members and loved ones of murder victims often find themselves 
entangled in the justice system for a very long time. In fact, in Colorado, the 
trial portion of the process alone is six times longer than if the state were 
seeking life without parole.

4. The death penalty is not evenly applied. For starters, only 31 of the 50 
U.S. states employ capital punishment. And even in states where it is an 
option, prosecutors can decide against pursuing a death sentence. This is the 
case in the "hot car death" in Cobb County, Georgia, involving Justin Ross 
Harris, who is accused of murdering his young son by leaving him strapped in a 
car seat to bake to death. With the death penalty off the table, any conviction 
and appeals process would be much shorter than in a capital case.

Wise use of prosecutorial discretion should therefore be welcome, not least 
because prosecutors know their cases better than anyone else. Also, 
prosecutorial discretion can mean that a case costs much less, eliminates many 
appellate issues, shortens the trial and ultimately brings the matter to a 
conclusion much sooner than if it were a death penalty trial.

5. Despite safeguards, innocent people do wind up on death row. The fact is 
that innocent people are convicted and sometimes end up on death row. I have 
plenty of heartbreaking stories of clients who, in my opinion, were convicted 
of crimes they did not commit. And I am far from alone -- there have been 154 
verified cases of death row exonerations since 1973. Meanwhile, a study last 
year found that, at a conservative estimate, "more than 4 % of inmates 
sentenced to death in the United States are probably innocent." Indeed, there 
have been 330 exonerations based on DNA alone, with 20 of those defendants 
having served time on death row since the advent of DNA technology. A case from 
North Carolina underscores this point. There, Henry McCollum was released last 
year after spending some 30 years on death row for the murder of an 11-year-old 
girl that DNA evidence suggested he did not commit. With cases such as this, it 
defies all reason to believe that no innocent person has been executed in the 
United States.

The bottom line is this: While the death penalty is neither "cruel," when 
taking into account the cruelty so often inflicted on the victim, nor 
"unusual," in that it has been around for millennia, there are simply too many 
practical reasons for states to curtail or abandon their use of the death 
penalty. Our criminal justice system -- and those caught up in it, including 
the families of victims -- would be the biggest beneficiaries should we choose 
to end capital punishment in the United States.

Of course, the debate over capital punishment is a longstanding one, and there 
is no end to it in sight. But it is hard not to question the rationality -- 
indeed the sanity -- of continuing to follow a system that does not deter 
violent crime for determined individuals. Just ask Chattanooga or Charleston.

(source: Opinion, Philip Holloway, CNN Legal Analyst----WCTI news)

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

Inside 'Guantanamo North'


Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been sent to a maximum-security federal 
prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. What's it like? Here's everything you need to 
know:

Who ends up in this prison?

Home to federal death row, the maximum-security penitentiary in Terre Haute, 
Indiana, boasts a menacing mix of terrorists, serial killers, white 
supremacists, and child molesters. Enemy combatant John Walker Lindh, the 
so-called American Taliban, will be one of Tsarnaev's new neighbors; so, too, 
will Abduwali Muse, one of the Somali pirates who took on Capt. Richard 
Phillips. The facility is also home to the execution chamber where Oklahoma 
City bomber Timothy McVeigh met his end in 2001. Tsarnaev, 21, is currently 
appealing his sentence to avoid that fate, but while he does so, federal death 
row's newest and youngest member will probably spend at least a decade in a 
facility so restrictive, it's earned the nickname "Guantanamo North." Sister 
Rita Clare Gerardot, an activist who has worked with death-row inmates, said 
prisoners are kept isolated in tiny cells all day, with almost no human 
contact. "Truthfully, I don't know how they keep their sanity."

What's inside Terre Haute?

There are 2 special units. Tsarnaev is likely to be placed in the Special 
Confinement Unit (SCU), built in 1993 to house federal death row inmates. 
Details on the prison are scarce, but inmates are believed to spend almost 
every waking minute in their cells, furnished with a bed, shower, desk, toilet, 
sink, and 13-inch television. Sister Rita reported that inmates went outside 
for just 5 hours a week - and even then, usually only to wander into designated 
cages to exercise and take a peak at the sky. 1 inmate found those conditions 
so hellish, said the ACLU, that he volunteered for execution. Tsarnaev also 
might end up in the Communications Management Unit (CMU), a special 50-cell 
facility for terrorists and other dangerous prisoners. The inmates there are 
remotely watched and monitored every minute of every day by a team of 
intelligence officials in West Virginia. That unit, and other isolation units, 
were designed to keep terrorists from radicalizing other inmates or slipping 
dangerous messages to fellow terrorists outside.

Are all terrorists sent there?

No. Had Tsarnaev avoided the death penalty, he could have served a life 
sentence at the only federal "supermax" in the country: ADX Florence, in 
Colorado. Nicknamed the "Alcatraz of the Rockies," ADX houses some of America's 
most notorious criminals, including the "Unabomber," Ted Kaczynski, and "shoe 
bomber" Richard Reid. There, inmates spend 23 hours a day in a concrete cell 
averaging 12 feet by 7 feet, with a 4-inch window at the top to let in some 
natural light. If the inmates become frustrated and act out, their limbs are 
strapped to their bed for days at a time, in a process known as four-pointing. 
Even former ADX warden Robert Hood has gone on record describing the prison as 
a "clean version of hell." This place "is not designed for humanity," said 
Hood.

Has anyone objected?

Yes. 11 ADX prisoners have filed a class-action lawsuit against the Federal 
Bureau of Prisons (BOP) arguing that prolonged solitary confinement violates 
the Constitution's Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual 
punishment. One inmate, Jack Powers, said he was driven so mad by the lack of 
human interaction that he bit off his own finger and amputated his own 
testicle. "There are instances of people who literally go insane in solitary 
confinement," said psychology professor Craig Haney. "I've seen it happen."

Is this happening just at ADX?

Not at all. Solitary was once reserved as a way of punishing and controlling 
the most disruptive or dangerous prisoners in maximum-security lockups. Yet in 
prisons throughout the country, 80,000 inmates are now held in ADX-style 
isolation on any given day. Prisoners can be isolated for months on end for the 
slightest of infractions - such as posting something on social media, or 
talking back to a guard. ACLU campaigner Amy Fettig says an increasing number 
of prison officials in both red and blue states are beginning to "recognize 
that solitary confinement has been overused and abused in the last 30 years."

Does solitary confinement work?

Studies show that it does not reduce prison violence, and as a form of 
rehabilitation, it's a disaster. A 2001 study of Connecticut prisons found that 
solitary inmates were 50 % more likely to be rearrested within three years of 
release than nonsolitary inmates. "It was meant to make inmates improve," said 
Maine prison warden Rodney Bouffard, of solitary. "The reality is that exactly 
the opposite happens." That's because long stretches of solitary fill prisoners 
with rage and make it difficult for them to function in the real world, which 
they find overwhelming (see below). Now just 21, Tsarnaev - who has no hope of 
ever being released - will likely never leave solitary, unless it's to be 
executed. "He's looking at spending potentially at least the next 50 years in 
isolation," said associate law professor Laura Rovner. "It's almost 
unfathomable."

Life after solitary confinement

Transitioning back into society after imprisonment isn't easy - and it's even 
less so after solitary confinement, which research has shown to cause severe 
psychological damage. Robert King spent a staggering 29 years in solitary in 
the Louisiana state penitentiary before being released in 2001 for a 1972 
murder he didn't commit. For those 3 decades, King spent every day pacing up 
and down his 9-by-6-foot cell, counting to himself as he did so. Whenever he 
was caught trying to communicate with other inmates, King would be placed for a 
month in the "cold box" of Camp J, going for blocks of 10 days without any 
interaction, even with the guards - save for a tray being pushed through a 
small slot in the cell door. "I was depressed every day," he says. The sensory 
depravation of solitary has permanently damaged King's sight, and he finds it 
difficult to judge distances after living in such a small space. More than a 
decade after his release, says King, he still gets "confused as to where I am, 
where I should be."

(source: The Week)

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

What the high court's marriage decision means for the death penalty


The Supreme Court's recent 5-4 decision to allow the continued use of midazolam 
in lethal injections may offer less insight about the future of capital 
punishment in America than the Court's historic decision to allow same-sex 
couples to marry. While the Court's decision in Glossip is confined to the very 
narrow issue of whether midazolam causes an undue risk of pain during 
execution, their decision on the freedom to marry illuminates how a changing 
national consensus can compel the Court to reevaluate its position on an issue 
that seemed intractable not so long ago.

The movement to end the death penalty has followed a similar trajectory as a 
national consensus against the practice has emerged and a majority of states 
have abandoned it in law or in practice. Today, 19 states and the District of 
Columbia legally bar the use of the death penalty--7 have done so in the past 8 
years. The Nebraska legislature, led by conservatives, ended the death penalty 
last month. Last year, the number of annual new death sentences reached a 40 
year low, while executions--carried out in just 7 states--reached a 20 year 
low.

Public support of the death penalty has also been declining since the late 
1990s. The numbers vary depending on how you ask the question, but a 2014 
Washington Post ABC poll found that 52 % of Americans preferred a sentence of 
life without parole for persons convicted of murder, while only 42 % chose the 
death penalty.

In May of last year, while deciding a death penalty case related to 
intellectual disability, Justice Kennedy counted Oregon as being "on the 
abolitionist side of the ledger," because it had "suspended the death penalty 
and executed only 2 individuals in the past 40 years," even though it still has 
the law on the books.

In his opinion in Hall v. Florida, Justice Kennedy considered both past and 
prospective disuse of the death penalty in determining how Oregon should be 
counted--demonstrating that usage, along with legislative and legal victories, 
matters when determining whether a consensus exists.

This is significant because Oregon is not unique in this regard.

In addition to the 19 states that currently prohibit the death penalty, 11 
states and the federal and military governments exhibit a degree of long-term 
disuse--having imposed just 1 or fewer executions per decade over the past 
half-century.

New Hampshire has not performed an execution in 86 years. Kansas, as the Hall 
Court noted, "has not had an execution in almost 5 decades." No person has made 
it past direct appeal in Kansas. The same is true for Wyoming, which currently 
has no one on its death row and has performed only 1 execution in 50 years. 
Colorado has executed just 3 people in the last 52 years. Gov. John 
Hickenlooper (D), who was re-elected in 2014, has asserted that no one will be 
executed during his tenure.

Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and the federal government 
have performed just 3 executions each over the past 50 years, while Oregon has 
performed just 2. The military government hasn't had an execution in over 50 
years.

In 2014, Washington State Gov. Jay Inslee (D) declared a moratorium on 
executions. That state has carried out only 5 executions in the last 50 years. 
Pennsylvania's newly elected governor, Tom Wolf, also indicated that he will 
block executions from occurring during his term.

In addition to a long-term pattern of disuse, 6 of these 11 states haven't 
performed an execution in more than a decade--meaning there is no recent usage 
either. Another 4 states are likely to reach the 10 year mark with no 
executions by mid-2016, including California. In fact, only 2 % of the counties 
in the U.S. have been responsible for the majority of cases leading to 
executions since 1976.

A variety of factors are likely driving the decline in death penalty usage. A 
series of very high-profile death row exonerations have contributed to 
Americans' growing skepticism about the accuracy of the criminal justice 
system. Half a dozen studies showing how much the death penalty costs in 
comparison to life imprisonment have also contributed to discontentment, 
especially among conservatives. A number of botched executions, the 
unwillingness of drug manufacturers to provide the lethal drugs needed for 
executions, and growing opposition from the medical and pharmaceutical sectors 
have also created obstacles to carrying out executions.

While some of these issues may have simply created temporary delays which could 
be alleviated by Glossip, it is unlikely that usage will return to the levels 
seen in the late 1990s--given all of the other factors that have contributed to 
the decline.

If these trends continue as expected, it won't be long before 34 states, plus 
the District of Columbia, and the federal and military governments, can be--to 
borrow a phrase from Justice Kennedy-- counted on the "abolitionist side of the 
ledger." This comes remarkably close to the 37 states that demonstrated a 
strong and growing consensus in support of the freedom to marry.

The Court should take another look at the constitutionality of the death 
penalty, as Justices Breyer and Ginsburg suggest in their Glossip dissent. If 
they follow the same path they took with marriage, and take note of the growing 
national consensus against capital punishment, the death penalty's demise may 
soon be on the horizon.

(source: Henderson Hill is a capital defense attorney and the director of the 
8th Amendment Project, which is working to end the death penalty 
nationwide----thehill.com)