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Arbitrary as Ever (II)

By Steve Hall

That's the title of Rob Smith's new post at Second Class Justice, and it includes new mapping of death sentences imposed since 1976. The chief complaint in Furman centered on the inability to distinguish between those who received a death sentence and those who were eligible but did not. The distribution of executions since the death penalty resumed in the 1976 speaks loudly to the continuing lack of any rational connection between those who commit murder who are  then sentenced to death and executed from those who commit murder but are never executed. A database of every execution since 1976 (paper here), compiled by Frank Baumgartner, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, demonstrates that even among the handful of counties in the United States with active death penalties, few counties have sentenced anyone to death who has been executed...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on October 27, 2010 (boomark / email).