The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area
response to a request from the governor, a commission made 37 recommendations
on lethal injection in the state. Florida says that it has followed the recommendations
and will now resume executions. The Tennessee governor ordered a moratorium on
executions in February 2007 pending a review by the Department of Corrections on
the administration of death sentences. Lethal-injection protocols were subsequently
revised in May 2007, and executions have resumed. Executions scheduled in 2006
were also suspended in Arkansas, California, Delaware, Maryland, and Missouri amid
concerns about the practice of lethal injection. In Missouri, a district-court decision
originally resulting in the suspension of executions was overruled in June 2007 by the
Court of Appeal for the Eighth Circuit, which held that Missouri’s lethal-injection
protocol does not violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and
unusual punishment.
In Nebraska, which uses electrocution as the sole means of carrying out the death
penalty, the state’s Supreme Court stayed the execution of an inmate in May 2007
pending the Court’s determination of whether death by electrocution constitutes
cruel and unusual punishment. Court hearings on electrocution are scheduled for
September 2007.
Statistics
Death sentences
The civilian death-row population by mid-2007 was 3,350 (3,291 men and 59
women), down from 3,373 during the same period in 2006.
Executions
Recently, the death penalty has primarily been exercised at the state level; there have
been no executions at the federal level since 2003. Similarly, since 1961, there have
been no executions under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
In 2006, 53 inmates were executed. Of these, 24 executions were carried out in
Texas, four in Oklahoma, four in Virginia, four in Florida, four in North Carolina, one
in South Carolina, one in Alabama, five in Ohio, one in Indiana, one in California,
one in Nevada, one in Mississippi, one in Montana, and one in Tennessee. Executions
continued to decline in 2006, dropping to their lowest level in 10 years. The number
of inmates sentenced to death also declined in 2006, consistent with a pattern of
decreasing death sentences since 2000.
From January to mid-July 2007, 30 inmates were executed. Of these, 18
executions were carried out in Texas, two in Oklahoma, one in Georgia, one in South
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