"Marking tomorrow’s 50th anniversary of the US Supreme Court decision in Furman v. Georgia, which struck down all of the nation’s death penalty statutes as arbitrary and capricious, the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) unveiled a first-of-its-kind database documenting more than 9,700 death sentences handed down across the country between the Court’s ruling in Furman and January 1, 2021," DPIC said in a press release.
"The data provide powerful evidence that the nation’s use of capital punishment continues to be arbitrary, unreliable, and infected with bias."
DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham in the same release said the data shows "a wasteful punishment, incompetently applied and beset by arbitrary factors such as race, place, and time."
"The Court said America wasn’t able to administer the death penalty fairly or reliably a half century ago. The data show we still can’t do it today," he said.
Dunham said when a death sentence is imposed, it is most likely to be overturned. Meanwhile, fewer than 1.1 percent of all US counties account for half of the incarcerated individuals on death row, he added. Moreover, people sentenced to die 30 years ago are in danger of being executed for crimes where the death penalty would not even be imposed today, he added.
He said DPIC’s census database also verifies that "when it comes to executions, white lives matter more than Black lives. Executions carried out over the past 50 years were six times more likely to involve a white victim than only victims who were Black," he said.
Defendants of color were disproportionately likely to be wrongfully convicted of capital offenses, he added, took longer to be exonerated, and comprised an overwhelming majority of the likely intellectually disabled people who continue to be executed in the US despite the constitutional prohibition against that practice.
Dunham also said America’s death penalty is disproportionate in the way it is carried out in a small number of states and counties which engage in "outlier practices" and have an absence of meaningful judicial process.
The DPIC said death sentences declined in the US by approximately 90% after peaking at more than 300 per year for 3 straight years in the mid-1990s.