Convicted murderers are being sentenced to death half as often as they were five years ago, and the population of death row is declining as a result, an anti-capital punishment information organization reported yesterday. The Death Penalty Information Center said U.S. courts are on track to deliver 130 death sentences in 2004, a 54 percent decline from the 1999 total of 282, while the number of people on death row shrank from 3,504 in 2003 to 3,471 in 2004.
Fifty-nine people were executed in 2004, down from 98 in 1999.
The organization said the sharp decline in death sentences reflects an erosion in public support for capital punishment because of recent exonerations of death-row inmates by DNA evidence. "Because of so many failures, the death penalty is rightly on the defensive," Richard Dieter, executive director of the center, said in a statement.
But Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a Sacramento-based nonprofit that supports prosecutors in constitutional law cases, said death sentences are on the decline mostly because murder is on the decline.
The number of murders and non-negligent homicides fell from 24,526 in 1993 to 16,037 in 2002, according to the FBI. If nothing else but the murder rate had changed, Scheidegger said, the number of death sentences still would have dropped by a third, from 327 in 1994 to 216 in 2003.
