U.S. death-row population on the decline
Executions, sentences fall in '04, report says
By Andrew Bridges
ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 14, 2005
WASHINGTON – The ranks of people sentenced to death and the number executed declined in 2004 as the nation's death-row population kept shrinking, the government reported yesterday.
Last year, a dozen states executed 59 prisoners, six fewer than in 2003, according to the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics. The report also said 125 people, including five women, who were convicted of murder received a death sentence last year. That was the smallest number in more than three decades.
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Tracy Snell, one of the report's authors, said the number of prisoners under death sentences has declined four years in a row, the result of a murder rate at its lowest level in 40 years. One death-penalty advocate said the threat of harsh punishment is responsible for that falling rate.
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Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, said jurors increasingly are reluctant to recommend the death penalty. Dieter cited cases where death-row prisoners have been freed after media or legal investigations; the use of DNA evidence to exonerate those wrongly convicted; and the increased availability of life-without-parole sentences as an alternative to capital punishment.
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