Death penalty rates plunge to lowest level in the US since 1970s

[inanna]

Source: The Guardian

Wednesday 16 December 2015 06.00 GMT

The painfully slow death of the death penalty in the United States continued to play itself out in 2015, reducing the ultimate punishment to levels not seen for the past 40 years, according to two new reports.

According to the annual report of the Death Penalty Information Center, capital punishment showed a sharp decline nationwide on all of the main indicators. The most jaw-dropping fall was in the number of new death sentences – a measure of the enthusiasm of the American people, as expressed through juries, for judicial killings – which reached a low not seen since the 1970s.

This year, 14 states and the federal government issued just 49 new death sentences. That’s a dramatic decline from the peak of 315 new sentences recorded in 1996 at the height of the moral panic around murder rates in big cities and the crack cocaine epidemic.

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This year, 28 executions have been performed, down from a 1999 peak of 98. Most tellingly, only six states were responsible for all those deaths, and within that rump an even smaller rump of just three states – Texas, Missouri and Georgia – performed the lion’s share.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/16/death-penalty-cases-us-lowest-level-40-years

[Android3.14]

1. "within that rump an even smaller rump of just three states"

What is a "rump" in this context? A subset?

[logosoco]

2. Interesting.

I have a nephew in law on death row here in Missouri. I have thought about how odd it is that if the murder had been committed about 20 miles east, he would not have gotten the DP (but surely I have mostly thought if it had not happened at all!!) ( i have always been against the DP, it was hard in this case because it is what the victims family wanted and I was not going to stand up to that!)