Title: Death Row Inmates Wait Years Before Execution - Sidebar - The New York Times
Headings: Lifelong Death Sentences
Sidebar
Lifelong Death Sentences

Content: Defense lawyers tend to be appointed, underpaid and overmatched. People with qualms about the death penalty are not allowed to serve on capital juries. It is only on the back end — on appeal and in other postconviction proceedings — that the legal system, at great length and expense, starts to examine seriously whether particular death sentences were actually warranted. A system that takes 33 years to issue a final decision about whether a defendant should live or die would seem to be broken. “The incentives driving the nation’s process of imposing and reviewing death sentences,” Professor Liebman wrote, “are skewed from stem to stern.” Advertisement
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