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Sentencing Law and Policy
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Why I obsess over courts and others obsessing about the death penalty

By Douglas Berman

The latest BJS stats on state felony sentencing provide me a statistical reminder about why I obsess over undue obsession about the death penalty.  Consider these basic number from this report:

In 2004 State courts convicted an estimated 1,079,000 adults of a felony….

Among the estimated 8,400 persons convicted of murder or nonnegligent manslaughter in 2004, 20.4% were sentenced to life in prison. In 2004, 29 States received 115 prisoners under sentence of death.

In other words, only roughly 1 in every 10,000 state felony sentences is a death sentence, and only 1 in 75 sentences for intentional homicide is a death sentence.  And yet the US Supreme Court and surely some other courts and academics likely spend far more time on death sentences than on any other type of state sentence.  What a waste, especially since those getting the death penalty are generally the worst of the very worst.

UPDATE:  Ben Barlyn goes deep with this strong follow-up reaction.  Here are highlights:

From my own vantage point here in New Jersey, where our death row is populated by nine — that’s it, folks, nine — profoundly repellent specimens of inhumanity and the general prison population is filled to bursting with thousands of non-violent drug offenders (the highest percentage in the USA, mind you), the imbalance referenced by Professor Berman is as acute as it disheartening.

I’m still amazed: a state commission transparently front-loaded with opponents of capital punishment issues a predictable and not-particularly illuminating report calling for the abolition of the death penalty in NJ (legislation to effectuate the report’s recommendation was long ago tabled — it is an election year, after all) and the world stops.

Yet not one news outlet in NJ saw fit to cover (or carry the AP story of) the more recent and far more shocking (and, to my knowledge, undisputed) findings of The Sentencing Project regarding the state’s well-known racial disparity between white and black inmates.