Counties that use death penalty are plagued by prosecutorial misconduct, bad lawyers & racial bias
/The death penalty in America is dying.
The trends are clear. In 2015, juries returned the fewest number of new death sentences—49—since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.1 The number of death sentences in 2015 has declined by more than 50 percent since 2009, which saw 118 death sentences, and by more than 600 percent since the peak of 315 sentences in 1996.2 Of the 31 states that legally retain the death penalty,3 only 14— or less than half—imposed a single death sentence in 2015.4
When we drill down to the county level, the large-scale abandonment of the death penalty in the country becomes even more apparent. Of the 3,143 county or county equivalents in the United States, only 16—or one half of one percent—imposed ve or more death sentences between 2010 and 2015.5 Six of those coun es are in Alabama (Je erson and Mobile) and Florida (Duval, Hillsborough, Miami-Dade and Pinellas)—the only two states that currently permit non-unanimous death verdicts.6 Of the remaining 10 coun es, ve are located in highly-populated Southern California (Kern, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino). The others include Caddo (LA), Clark (NV), Dallas (TX), Harris (TX) and Maricopa (AZ). As Jus ce Stephen Breyer noted in his 2015 dissent in Glossip v. Gross, “the number of ac ve death penalty coun es is small and ge ng smaller.”7
