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Death Penalty

Death Penalty. Trends. Public support for the death penalty is diminishing in the U.S. Roughly half the U.S. public now prefers life without parole over the death penalty as the best punishment for the crime of murder.

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Death Penalty

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  1. Death Penalty

  2. Trends • Public support for the death penalty is diminishing in the U.S. • Roughly half the U.S. public now prefers life without parole over the death penalty as the best punishment for the crime of murder.

  3. Annual death sentences in the U.S. have dropped dramatically since the year 2000. • In the last four years the number of death sentences has been lower than any time since reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976.

  4. Executions have declined: - from a high of 98 in 1999, - to just 37 in 2008; - there were 52 executions in 2009.

  5. Random executions The determining factors: • Politics; • Quality of legal counsel; • The jurisdiction where a crime is committed. • The death penalty is a lethal lottery: - of the 22,000 homicides committed every year approximately 150 people are sentenced to death. (Source:http://www.deathpenalty.org/article.php?list=type&type=13)

  6. Innocent people executed: • 139 men and women have been released from Death Row nationally. • ...some only minutes away from execution.

  7. Factors leading to wrongful convictions include: • Inadequate legal representation • Police and prosecutorial misconduct • Perjured testimony and mistaken eyewitness testimony

  8. Factors leading to wrongful convictions include: • Racial prejudice • Jailhouse "snitch" testimony • Suppression and/or misinterpretation of mitigating evidence • Community/political pressure to solve a case (Source: http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/death-penalty/us-death-penalty-facts/death-penalty-and-innocence)

  9. Cost • In Kansas found that the estimated cost of a death penalty case was 70% more than the cost of a comparable non-death penalty case. • Death penalty case costs (median cost $1.26 million). • Non-death penalty case costs (median cost $740,000).

  10. Cost • In Tennessee, death penalty trials cost an average of 48% more than the average cost of trials in which prosecutors seek life imprisonment.

  11. Cost • In Maryland death penalty cases cost 3 times more than non-death penalty cases, or $3 million for a single case. • In California the current system costs $137 million per year; it would cost $11.5 million for a system without the death penalty. (Source:http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/death-penalty/us-death-penalty-facts/death-penalty-cost)

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