By Aaron Miller-
Defendants and Prisoners subjected to new death sentences in 2020 were the most vulnerable with mental illness, intellectual disability, or brain damage, or who had the most defective court process. A few were under age 21 at the time of the crime for which they were executed.
The executed included several prisoners whose more culpable co-defendants received lesser sentences, a prisoner who was denied potentially exculpatory DNA testing, and prisoners whose executions were opposed by victims’ families, the report adds. Of those who were sentenced to death this year, more than 20% waived key procedural rights, including their rights to counsel and/or a jury trial, and three strongly proclaimed their innocence.
After a 17-year pause in federal executions, the US government carried out 10 in 2020, the highest single-year total in more than 120 years, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre (DPIC).
“We have never seen it before. We never expected to see it. And it may be a long time before we ever see it happen again,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the DPIC.
The Trump administration has three more executions scheduled ahead of the 20 January inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, a Democrat who has vowed to abolish the death penalty when he comes into power next month.
One of those in line to be executed is Lisa Montgomery, convicted of using a rope to strangle a pregnant woman, 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett, in 2004 and then using a kitchen knife to cut the baby girl from the womb, authorities said. Her execution date on 12 January would make her the first woman executed by the federal government in six decades.
The newly released report cited a 2020 Gallup poll in which 43 per cent of respondents said they oppose the death penalty – the highest level of opposition to capital punishment that Gallup registered since 1966.
Death Penalty Growing Unpopular
The end of year report, also slamming U.S president Trump for hastening a slew of federal executions just before his departure from the White House next month, highlights a heavily frowned upon killings rushed by the American president, ensuring no clemency or reversal of ruling is possible once he leaves office.
At the end of the year, more states had abolished the death penalty or gone ten years without an execution, more counties had chosen reform prosecutors who pledged never to seek the death penalty or to use it more sparingly. Fewer new death sentences were imposed than in any previous year since the Supreme Court struck down U.S. death penalty laws in 1972; and despite a six-month spree of federal executions without parallel in the 20th or 21st centuries, fewer executions were carried out than in any year in nearly three decades.
Louisiana and Utah conducted no executions at all throughout a ten year period. Over two-thirds of the United States (34 states) have now either abolished capital punishment (22 states) or not carried out an execution in at least ten years (another 12 states).
The report said 59% of all executions this year were conducted by the federal government, which in less than six months carried out more federal civilian executions than any prior president in the 20th or 21st centuries, Republican or Democratic, had authorized in any prior calendar year. The Trump administration performed the first lame-duck federal execution in more than a century, while scheduling more transition-period executions than in any prior presidential transition in the history of the United States.
The executions also presented public health problems, likely sparking an outbreak in a federal prison, infecting members of the execution teams, and causing two federal defence attorneys to contract COVID-19.
Wrongful Convictions
Wrongful convictions in the case of five prisoners due to prosecutorial misconduct led to the exoneration from death row in 2020. The men exonerated this year spent between 14 and 37 years awaiting justice. Three of them faced multiple trials, despite evidence of their innocence, and one – Curtis Flowers – was tried six times for the same crime.
Pennsylvania exoneree Walter Ogrod contracted COVID-19 and was denied transport to an independent hospital while he waited for a hearing on whether he would be freed.
The North Carolina Supreme Court issued several rulings overturning the state legislature’s attempt to retroactively reinstated life sentences for three former death-row prisoners and paved the way for approximately 140 to obtain hearings on the impact of race discrimination in their cases. A Florida Supreme Court reconstituted after mandatory retirements with activist judges from the Federalist Society.
A Florida Supreme Court also abandoned a century-old standard for heightened review in cases in which a conviction was based on circumstantial evidence, limited enforcement of a U.S. Supreme Court case that bars execution of intellectually disabled prisoners.