A new report from the Fair Punishment Project at Harvard looks at how the death penalty is operating in the small handful of counties across the country that are still using it. Of the 3,143 county or county equivalents in the United States, only 16—or one half of one percent—imposed five or more death sentences between 2010 and 2015. Clark County is one of those 16.
In conducting its analysis, they reviewed more than 200 direct appeals opinions handed down between 2006 and 2015 in eight of these counties (The other eight will be covered in part II). They found:
- Sixty percent of cases involved defendants with significant mental impairments or other forms of mitigation.
- Eighteen percent of cases involved a defendant who was under the age of 21 at the time of the offense.
- Forty-four percent of cases involved a defendant who had an intellectual disability, brain damage, or severe mental illness.
- Approximately one in seven cases involved a finding of prosecutorial misconduct. Clark County had misconduct in 47 percent of cases.
- Bad lawyering was a persistent problem across all of the counties. In most of the counties, the average mitigation presentation at the penalty phase of the trial, in which the defense lawyer is supposed to present all of the evidence showing that the defendant’s life should be spared–including testimony from mental health and other experts, lasted approximately one day.
- Five of the eight counties had at least one person exonerated from death row since 1976.
- Out of all of the death sentences obtained in these counties between 2010 and 2015, 41 percent were given to African-American defendants, and 69 percent were given to people of color.
- The race of the victim is also a significant factor in who is sentenced to death in many of these counties. In Clark County, 71 percent of all of the victims were white in cases resulting in a death sentence.
Also, public defenders in Clark County are handling 5 or 6 death cases on top of a normal caseload of 5-10 murder cases. That is a structural flaw that virtually guarantees defendants don’t get the additional care and attention their cases deserve. If the Legislature does not completely repeal the death penalty next session, at a minimum they need to establish caseload limits for capital punishment.
However, this is just more evidence no amount of reforms will make the death penalty less costly, inefficient, or arbitrary. There is only one real solution – abolition.
