ABSTRACT
Of the 50 American states, 37 make provision for the death penalty.1 Thirteen states, along with the District of Columbia, have abolished the practice. In terms of the number of executions, in the modern era2 capital punishment has claimed the lives of 1,057 prisoners but, from a high of 98 executions in 1999, its use has declined markedly, with 2006 seeing ‘only’ 53 death sentences carried out (NAACP 2007, 7). Progress over the last 30 years has largely been due to the expansion of the constitutional parameters of the Eighth Amendment at the hands of the United States Supreme Court.3 The reduction in numbers of inmates put to death, albeit culled from a large death row population of almost three and a half thousand (NAACP 2007, 1), is driven by a progressively narrowing range of circumstances in which the death penalty may be applied – so that capital punishment may not now be sought for certain offences4 or applied to certain types of offender5 – and a series of maturing procedural safeguards aimed at the fair and equitable administration of capital punishment.6 In that same 30-year period,
the average time spent on death row prior to execution has risen from 4 years and 3 months to 12 years and 3 months, with many death row inmates serving considerably in excess of that (Snell 2006, 17).
