Roe Wilson sounds at peace with the fact that she has handled or supervised 91 executions in the 20 years she has overseen capital case appeals.
“I’ve seen what these defendants have done to people,” said Wilson, an assistant district attorney in Harris County, Texas — the busiest death penalty county in the US’ busiest death penalty state.
Several cases come to mind for her, including a man accused of killing his adoptive parents, two sisters and brother-in-law. The victims were suffocated or fatally beaten with a crowbar, then bound with tape and plastic ties and burned. He died proclaiming his innocence.
“When crimes happen, what you read in the newspapers is so antiseptic. They don’t say what the bodies looked like,” she said.
Wilson’s views are not unusual, particularly in the conservative Southern states, where the biblical view of an eye for an eye rings true. Such states remain committed to capital punishment, despite signs that other parts of the US are moving away from it.
Countrywide, death sentences and executions have been on a steady decline for more than a decade. Legislation being debated in several states to abolish capital punishment is getting more attention than in the past.
US President Barack Obama has said he is in favor of executions only in extreme cases. He could appoint more liberal justices to federal courts who are less likely to impose death sentences.
Observers say the death penalty is not likely to end soon in a country where polls still show 60 percent of people support executions. They point to the conservative South as the major reason.
“What everybody needs to know is that this is a highly diverse country, and that what happens in one or two or three states is not an indicator of a national trend,” said Richard Bonnie, a law professor at the University of Virginia and an expert on capital punishment.
“There is virtually no likelihood in the foreseeable future that southern states will abolish the death penalty,” he said.
Of the 1,151 executions nationwide since the US Supreme court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, the vast majority — 951 — were in the South, the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center says. Texas executed 431 people.
Eleven states out of the 36 that have the death penalty are considering abolishing it, though one of the states with pending legislation is Texas, and the bill is not expected to get far. The remaining 10 have executed a total of 30 people since 1976. Two of those — New Hampshire and Kansas — did not carry out any executions.
Recent death row exonerations prompted by improved methods of testing physical evidence, including DNA samples, have planted seeds of doubt. And changes to state laws also have made a difference, as more states have given juries the option of imposing life without parole.
Financial necessity also is a driving factor. The death penalty is an expensive proposition — trials often require extra lawyers for appeals and higher security costs — and cash-strapped states are responding to the notion that it is cheaper to imprison people for life.
Death sentences dropped from 295 nationwide in 1993 to 111 last year, the Death Penalty Information Center said. Death sentences have also dropped in the South.
“Things are definitely changing. It’s changing here,” said Richard Rosen, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an opponent of capital punishment.
North Carolina hasn’t put an inmate to death in more than two years and is not likely to do so soon, because of an ongoing legal battle over whether doctors can be involved in lethal injections.
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