NEW RESOURCES: BJS Releases “Capital Punishment, 2016”

The nation’s death rows continue to shrink more rapidly than new defendants are being sentenced to death, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) statistical brief, “Capital Punishment, 2016,” released April 30, 2018. (Click image to enlarge.) The statistical brief, which analyzes information on those under sentence of death in the United States as of December 31, 2016, contains official government figures documenting continuing declines in executions, new death sentences, and death-row populations across the U.S. BJS reports that 2,814 prisoners remained under sentence of death in 32 states and the federal system at the end of 2016, representing a decrease of 58 prisoners and a 2% decline in the U.S. death-row population in 2016. It was the sixteenth consecutive annual decrease in the number of prisoners under sentence of death in the U.S., down 787 (22%) since the year-end high of 3,601 on December 31, 2000. BJS tracks the status of death-row prisoners from the date they are admitted to a state or federal correctional facility on capital charges, not the date they were actually sentenced. According to BJS, 32 prisoners were admitted to state or federal death rows in 2016. (DPIC uses a slightly different counting method that reported 31 new death sentences imposed in 2016.) The BJS data indicates that the decline in the size of death row is attributable to factors other than execution. BJS reports that 70 prisoners were removed from death row in 2016 by means other than execution, such as exoneration, the reversal of a conviction or death sentence, commutation, or death by other causes, as compared with 20 who were executed. Nineteen prisoners were reported to have died on death rows of natural causes; 11 prisoners were removed from Connecticut’s death row when its state supreme court declared its death-penalty statute unconstitutional; and 40 were released from death rows when their convictions and/or death sentences were overturned in the courts.

(Elizabeth Davis and Tracy L. Snell, Statistical Brief: Capital Punishment, 2016, Bureau of Justice Statistics, April 2018.) See Studies. Read DPIC’s Year End Report for 2016.