Title: Capital Punishment: The end of the death penalty
Headings: Death
the
Death
of the
Death Penalty
Why the era of capital punishment is ending
130
593

Content: Of the 14 inmates executed so far this year in the U.S., five spent from 20 to 30 years on death row, five more languished from 15 to 19 years, and not one spent less than a decade awaiting execution. On May 24, Nebraska death-row inmate Michael ­Ryan died of cancer, nearly 30 years after he was sentenced to be executed by the state. State and federal courts are so backlogged with capital cases that they can never catch up. Roughly half of California’s 750 condemned inmates have not even begun their appeals because they are waiting for the state’s underfunded defense bureaucracy to give them a lawyer. Moving faster creates its own problems. The risks involved in trying to speed executions are apparent in the growing list of innocent and likely innocent death-row prisoners set free— more than 150 since 1975. In Ohio, Wiley Bridgeman walked free 39 years after he was sentenced to death when the key witness at his trial—a 12-year-old boy at the time—admitted that he invented his story to try to help the police. In general, scientific advances have undermined confidence in the reliability of eyewitness testimony and exposed flaws in the use of hair and fiber evidence. DNA analysis, meanwhile, has offered concrete proof that the criminal justice system can go disastrously wrong, even in major felony cases. In North Carolina last year, two men sentenced to death as teenagers were released after DNA evidence proved they weren’t guilty.