Post by carolinem on Sept 29, 2007 5:29:46 GMT -5
Juries increasingly prefer option of life without parole
By HEATHER VOGELL
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Robyn Lang felt that if you kill, you should be killed.
Then she sat on Robert Spickler Jr.'s jury.
Spickler had met his victim, Bruce Belville, in Las Vegas. Months later, Spickler and a friend stopped to see the Cobb County businessman while driving to Florida. The three drank away the night at a bar before returning to Belville's home.
When Belville fell asleep, Spickler smashed in his skull with a sledgehammer and fled with his credit cards.
Spickler deserved the utmost punishment for the brutal act, Cobb District Attorney Pat Head told jurors. But in the jury room, Lang decided the death penalty was less clear-cut than she'd thought.
"I still saw this man as a human being," said Lang, a schoolteacher. "The death penalty to me is for certain killers, for somebody who could murder again, somebody who is a danger."
She and 11 other jurors decided Spickler qualified for execution under Georgia law. But they sentenced him in 2001 to life without parole.
Lang's reluctance to impose death, a penalty she had long supported, mirrors an ambivalence that has taken hold of juries across Georgia and the nation.
Georgia juries have rejected death in two of every three capital cases since 2000, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's study of murder convictions shows.
Last year, for the first time in 30 years, no Georgia jury issued a death sentence.
That marked a departure from the mid- to late 1990s, when juries imposed death about half the time. In 1997 and 1998, juries sent killers to death row 67 percent of the time.
The drop-off is stark when measured in death sentences: Georgia sent five or more people to death row every year between 1974 and 2000. It's sent fewer than five each year since then.
Public opinion polls show that support for the death penalty continues to run high throughout the South.
But experts say a raft of factors have sent death sentences tumbling here and across the country. Better-trained defense lawyers, the option of life without parole, a dip in violent crime and, possibly, a shift in Americans' view of execution are all contributing, they say.
At one time, execution was the only way Georgia juries could guarantee a killer would never walk free.
But the popularity of life without parole has surged since 1993, when Georgia lawmakers made that sentence possible for capital cases. Juries chose it in a third of death penalty trials in the five years before 2000; the rate nearly doubled in the five years that followed.
Juries' reluctance to impose death has frustrated prosecutors. They tried but failed this year to persuade lawmakers to allow a death sentence even when a jury does not unanimously agree.
"To me, it is just a line that must be drawn at some point," said Head, the Cobb district attorney. "Unless juries are willing to impose the death penalty, we don't have a line."
Yet the newspaper's analysis shows prosecutors are also a reason for the sentence drop. Between 2000 and 2004, they took death penalty cases to juries only half as often as they had before.
Some experts say prosecutors and juries are behaving more cautiously in reaction to bad publicity for the death penalty in recent years.
Ten of the 38 death penalty states have put executions on hold ‹ seven because of challenges that lethal injection constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, according to state officials and the Death Penalty Information Center.
Exonerations of death row criminals because of DNA and other evidence have also heightened fear that an innocent person could be executed, experts say.
Scott Sundby, a law professor and death penalty expert at Washington and Lee University, said he believes better training and support for defense lawyers also explain the drop in death trials. Three U.S. Supreme Court decisions since 2000 have underscored that the court will overturn a death sentence if the defendant is not represented properly.
The cost of death penalty prosecutions has climbed as capital defense has grown more thorough. Sundby said those higher costs, the reduced odds of victory, and a perception that perhaps the public isn't demanding death as it once did may all be discouraging prosecutors from taking death cases to trial.
Some observers wonder whether the death penalty will peter out on its own.
Sundby said many people continue to support execution despite the criticism because they believe no other punishment is right for egregious killers such as Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who was put to death in 2001.
Yet Mike Bowers, who argued in favor of dozens of executions when he was Georgia's attorney general, said he believes the death penalty's future is uncertain.
"I genuinely believe we're seeing the decline and demise of the death penalty in this country," Bowers said. "I think it's because of the cost, the interminable delays and society's demand that there be certainty, and that makes it almost impossible."