Capital Punishment

The United States Supreme Court allowed states to reinstate capital punishment in 1976. In 2009, New Mexico became the 15th state to repeal the death penalty, in part because of budget considerations and the high cost of death penalty appeals.

Death sentences handed down by judges and juries in 2009 continued a trend of decline for seven years in a row, with 106 projected for the year. That level is down two-thirds from a peak of 328 in 1994, according to a report by the Death Penalty Information Center, a research organization that opposes capital punishment.

While death sentences are in decline, executions rose in 2009, according to the report. Fifty-two prisoners have been put to death in 2009, compared with 42 in 2007 and 37 in 2008.

On Dec. 8, 2009, Ohio prison officials executed a death row inmate, Kenneth Biros, with a one-drug intravenous lethal injection, a method never before used on a human.

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The new method, which involved a large dose of anesthetic, akin to how animals are euthanized, has been hailed by most experts as painless and an improvement over the three-drug cocktail used in most states, but it is unlikely to settle the debate over the death penalty.

While praising the shift to a single drug, death penalty opponents argue that Ohio's new method, and specifically its backup plan of using intra-muscular injection, has not been properly vetted by legal and medical experts and that since it has never been tried out on humans before, it is the equivalent of human experimentation.

But the United States Supreme Court refused to intervene and the procedure went largely as planned.

In 2009, some state legislatures have tried unsuccessfully to repeal the death penalty, with cost being a factor. An effort in Colorado failed in May. The lawmakers there focused on questions of deterrence, certainty or doubt in the age of genetic evidence, and, far from least in the mix, money in a time of shrinking government resources. Colorado has executed only one person since 1976.

The Colorado repeal bill was very much in keeping with what has become a national debate about the financial costs of the death penalty, especially as the recession hits state budgets hard. In Kansas, the Republican sponsor of a death penalty repeal proposal specifically cited cost-benefit analysis in tough times as a reason for rethinking capital punishment. The bill cleared a legislative committee and was sent back for more study, ending its chances of passage in 2009.

On June 2, the Supreme Court, which banned the execution of the mentally impaired in 2002, unanimously ruled that prosecutors in Ohio should have a new opportunity to prove that a death row inmate there was not retarded and thus was eligible to be executed. The prosecutors were not bound, the court said, by statements in court decisions issued before 2002 saying that he was retarded.

The month before, the court agreed to hear a capital case in Alabama involving a mentally impaired defendant, Holly Wood. The defense lawyer, with only a year of practice, had withheld evidence that his client was mentally retarded.

Even as the use of capital punishment has ebbed, another trend among judges has become evident. The number of fervent lonely dissents by judges on behalf of death row inmates has noticeably increased in the last decade, compared with previous years, according to a review of death penalty opinions by the New York Times and confirmed by experts in the field.

In dozens of capital cases, appeals court judges, some of whom have ruled in favor of the death penalty many times, have complained that Congress and the Supreme Court have raised daunting barriers for death row prisoners to appeal their convictions, and in many cases the judges have taken on their colleagues.

sources from: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/capital_punishment/index.html