death penalty news December 14, 2004
USA: Report: Fewer executions in 2004 - Group opposed to death penalty finds five-year decline Use of the death penalty by states continued a five-year decline in 2004, according to an annual report by a nonprofit group that opposes capital punishment. According to statistics to be released Tuesday by the Death Penalty Information Center, 40 percent fewer executions were carried out this year than in 1999. The center also found that fewer Americans support capital punishment and that fewer prisoners are being sent to death rows. In its annual survey, the center found that 59 people had been executed this year as of mid-December, and The Associated Press reported that no more executions were scheduled. In 1999, 98 people were put to death. The vast majority of executions this year, 85 percent, occurred in the South, up 10 percentage points from 1999. Twelve percent were in the Midwest, and just 3 percent in Western states. No one from the Northeast has been executed in the past two years, but Connecticut is scheduled to put a convicted murderer to death next month. Michael Ross has refused to pursue further appeals, and his execution would be the first in the state since 1960. He has admitted to killing eight women in Connecticut and New York in the 1980s. A federal Justice Department survey of the death penalty released last month showed similar statistics, including a 30-year low in the number of defendants given death sentences. (Full story). The center also released a Gallup poll that showed half of Americans surveyed preferred the death penalty to life in prison without parole for convicted killers and 46 percent supported life without parole. A survey five years ago showed 56 percent supported execution. Questions have been raised about the death penalty in high levels of at least three state governments this year. New York's highest court found its capital punishment law to be unconstitutional. Leaders in New Jersey and California have called for a moratorium on executions amid questions about the methods and legal procedures surrounding the issue. In January 2003, outgoing Illinois Gov. George Ryan granted clemency to all 167 inmates then on his state's death row. Last year, a dozen people were freed from death rows, more than any other year since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, according to the AP. This year, five people have been released, the AP reported. "The events of the past year and the statistical evidence all point in one direction," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. "The public's confidence in the death penalty has seriously eroded over the past several years. Because of so many failures, the death penalty is rightly on the defensive. Life-without-parole offers the public a better alternative without all the risks and expense." Since 1976, 944 people have been put to death. Texas has had the most executions, at 336, more than a third of the nation's total. Thirty-eight states and the federal government allow capital punishment, but six of those states have not executed anyone since 1976. (source: CNN) ======================= TEXAS: Heavy metal killer's execution stay lifted The U.S. Supreme Court refused to reconsider a San Antonio man's death penalty Monday, even as one of the justices went out of his way to say the sentence was unfair and deserves to be overturned. The court's decision automatically lifted the stay of execution that spared Troy Kunkle last month, but the fate of the former Roosevelt High School student seemed far from settled. Plainly disturbed by the way Kunkle was sentenced, Justice John Paul Stevens accompanied his vote to reject the case with a written explanation that seemed to invite another round of appeals. Stevens was the only justice to address the case and characterized the court as stymied by procedural barriers. He said the justices had no authority to review Kunkle's appeal because it hinged on state law, not federal. "That result is regrettable because it seems plain that Kunkle's sentence was imposed in violation of the Constitution," Stevens concluded. Kunkle's case taps into ongoing tension between the Supreme Court and the lower courts over the treatment of death sentences issued in Texas before 1991. Until the law was changed that year, Texas courts did not clearly tell jurors they could spare a defendant's life if they found mitigating evidence, such as mental illness. The high court told the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals twice this year that they improperly reviewed and upheld death sentences from that era. Some victims-rights advocates characterize the Supreme Court as mercurial and suggest the justices deserve blame if lower courts are confused. "It's impossible to know what the rules are because the Supreme Court keeps changing them," said Dianne Clements, executive director of the Houston-based nonprofit victims advocacy group Justice For All. Some experts predict Kunkle's case will receive further review ? even though the court has now twice declined to consider appeals filed by the 38-year-old man who has spent more than half his life on death row. He shot a man during a 1984 stickup in Corpus Christi and then recited lyrics from the heavy metal song "No Remorse." "I would say this is going to prove to be a minor bump in a long road that is eventually going to end in victory for Mr. Kunkle," said Eric Freedman, a Hofstra University law professor and a close watcher of death penalty litigation. Kunkle's lawyers were encouraged by Justice Stevens' conclusions and resolved to press ahead with arguments that the inmate has a history of mental illness that jurors were not allowed to consider adequately during trial. "It would just be obscene to kill a man when he did not get a proper sentencing," said Danalynn Recer, an attorney with the Gulf Region Advocacy Center, a nonprofit group that aids death penalty defenses. While it was not immediately clear whether prosecutors would request another execution date, they remained steadfast in their defense of Kunkle's conviction. Greg Norman, the prosecutor handling the appeal for the Nueces County district attorney's office, said no mitigating evidence would have saved Kunkle from the death sentence: "I guess our position, if you sweep away all the legal nuances, is that we're comfortable he got what he deserved." (source: San Antonio Express News)
