Notable data on the huge number of LWOP sentences in Louisiana

Death penalty practices in general, and individual death sentences in particular, garner a lot of attention in the US.  I understand how a wide array of salient capital issues and cases keeps these matters “evergreen” in legal and political discourse, even though I have long worried about capital cases and concerns problematically crowding out other matters of broader consequence.  (Many years ago, I wrote up some of these worries with a Supreme Court focus in an article titled “A Capital Waste of Time? Examining the Supreme Court’s ‘Culture of Death’.”  Notably, for a host of reasons, the SCOTUS capital docket has shrunk considerably since I penned that piece in 2008.)

These concerns came to mind for me upon seeing this new Sentencing Project fact sheet titled “Life in Prison Without Parole in Louisiana.”  The LWOP data in this document struck me in part because of how much attention was given in 2023 to possible clemency hearings for the 57 persons on Louisiana’s death row after outgoing Gov John Bel Edwards said he opposed capital punishment (see some prior posts here and here.)  Gov Edwards got some attention, as detailed here, for commuting over 100 LWOP sentences, though seemingly the bulk of national advocacy and attention was given to a few dozen capital murders rather than the few thousand serving LWOP often for lesser crimes.  The start of the data brief documents the Pelican State’s massive LWOP population:  

Louisiana’s share of people serving life without parole (LWOP) ranks highest per capita nationally and in the world. More than 4,000 Louisianans are serving sentences of life without the possibility of parole, amounting to 15% of this state’s prison population.  Between 1995 and 2020, the state added an average of 110 people each year to its total count of life-sentenced individuals.

A major driver behind the large share of people serving LWOP is the state’s automatic imposition of this sentence after conviction for second degree murder, making it one of only two states to impose LWOP in such instances.  Louisiana’s second degree murder statute includes felony murder and drug induced homicide offenses; these cases often include instances where the charged individual was not the direct perpetrator of the killing, nor intended to commit it, though they participated in an underlying felony related to the victim’s death.  It is important to note that felony murder laws such as that in Louisiana are not associated with a significant reduction in felonies nor have they lowered the number of felonies that become deadly.  These crime types are infrequently subject to LWOP sentences elsewhere, much less mandatorily imposed.  But in Louisiana, LWOP in response to second degree murder is both authorized and mandatory.

To provide a bit more perspective on these numbers, there are roughly twice as many persons serving LWOP sentences just in Louisiana than there are persons on death row throughout the United States.  (The Sentencing Project has calculated in prior reports that there are, roughly speaking, about 100 persons serving some form of a life sentence in the US for every person on death row.)