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: Suffice it to say, a legal system that requires half a lifetime to conclude the case of a proven lethal recidivist is not a well-functioning operation. Nor is that case unusual. In Florida alone, three other men who arrived on death row in 1975 are still there, marking their 40-year anniversaries—part of a total death-row population in that state of 394. ( In those 40 years, Florida has carried out 90 executions. At that rate, the Sunshine State would need about 175 years to clear out its death row.) 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.