Capital Punishment’s Victims Now ‘the Most Vulnerable of the Vulnerable’: Report

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Despite a decline in executions across the country, capital punishment continues to be imposed on inmates with mental disabilities and others with lack of access to adequate legal counsel, says the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).

“We are seeing fewer and fewer executions, but those that do occur demonstrate that the death penalty is not reserved for the worst of the worst, but the most vulnerable of the vulnerable,” said Ngozi Ndulue, DPIC’s Deputy Director, in introducing the Center’s latest year-end review of death penalty cases across the country.

According to the review, released Thursday, the use of capital punishment has now reached its lowest level since 1972, when the Supreme Court allowed the death penalty to be restored.

As of Dec. 13, 18 people had been sentenced to death in 2021.  In an earlier report released this week, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that the number of inmates held under sentence  in 28 state facilities and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) had already declined by 4 percent in 2020 compared to the previous year.

The pandemic helped drive down the numbers as many prison facilities locked down during the year to prevent the spread of COVID, but 2021 marked the seventh consecutive year where there were fewer than 50 death sentences and 30 executions, said the DPIC.

The number of executions would likely have declined even further except for a spate of death penalty approvals under the outgoing administration of President Donald Trump, the DPIC said.

“The federal government began 2021 with the last three executions of the historically aberrant federal execution spree, executing people with severe mental illness, intellectual disability, and unexamined evidence of innocence,” said Ndulue.

“The state executions since then followed the same pattern.”

According to the DPIC, Virginia’s historic repeal of the death penalty in March, in a bipartisan vote of the Commonwealth Assembly, was  a highlight of the year, as it signaled the first southern state to end capital punishment.

The nonprofit DPIC has been a critical source of information to death penalty researchers.

Mapping Executions

“The death penalty grew increasingly geographically isolated in 2021, and public support dropped to its lowest levels in a half-century,” said Robert Dunham, DPIC’s Executive Director.

Only five states and the federal government carried out executions in 2021. Texas and the federal government each executed three people. Oklahoma executed two. Three states – Alabama, Mississippi, and Missouri – each executed one person; while another three states— Alabama, Oklahoma, and Texas — accounted for a half of all death sentences and a majority of executions, according to the report.

The continuing geographic isolation and arbitrariness of the death penalty was reflected in the fact that just five counties — Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, and Bexar in Texas and Oklahoma County in Oklahoma — now account for more than 20 percent of all executions in the United States since the 1970s, the DPIC said.

For a seventh straight year, there were no executions west of Texas, the researchers reported.

On the federal side, the researchers noted that the Joe Biden has putg federal executions on pause.

Racism Still Rampant

 Racism continued to infect the use of the death penalty this past year, as it has since America’s beginnings, the researchers found.

The report details how “the majority of those sentenced to death in 2021 (10 of 18, 55.6 percent) were Black or Latinx; 56 percent  of those executed (6 of 11) were Black.”

The DPIC said: “83.3 percent of the death sentences and half of the executions involving Black men were for interracial offenses, as were three of the four new death sentences imposed on Latino defendants.

“More than three-quarters of new death sentences (14 of 18, 77.8 percent) involved a white victim and no white person was condemned or executed in a case that didn’t involve a white victim.”

The report noted as well that two more death-row prisoners were exonerated in 2021 — bringing the number of exonerees from death row to 186 from 1972.

The full 2021 Year End Report can be accessed here.

Additional Reading: Number of US Executions Continues to Decline: BJS

TCR Associate Editor Andrea Cipriano prepared this summary.