Charleston shooter death sentence goes against national trend
Dylan Roof’s pending death sentence for killing nine people at a Charleston church in June marks a departure from a national downward trend in capital punishment cases.
The number of new death penalty cases across the USA have declined steeply the past two decades, from more than 300 a year in the mid-1990s to just 30 last year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes the death penalty. That number broke a 40-year-low of 49 in 2015.
Executions also have fallen sharply from nearly 100 in 1999 to 20 last year, according to the center. Better defense teams, widespread publicity of wrongful-conviction cases and shifting public perceptions of capital punishment have contributed to the sharp decline, said Robert Dunham, the center’s executive director.
“We’re in the midst of a political climate change on capital punishment,” Dunham said. “The long-term trend is continuing reduced use of the death penalty.”
Federal jury sentences Dylann Roof to death
Roof, 22, used a .45 caliber semiautomatic handgun to kill parishioners gathered for prayer service at Emanuel African Methodist Church in downtown Charleston. At his federal sentence hearing Tuesday, Roof, a self-proclaimed white supremacist, told jurors “I felt like I had to do it, and I still feel like I had to do it.”
Jurors took just three hours to recommend the death penalty. He’ll be formally sentenced Wednesday.
But in many ways, Roof’s case is an anomaly: He chose to defend himself, showed no remorse and alluded to killing again, said Brandon Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, who has studied death penalty cases from 1990 to 2015. Defending capital punishment cases takes time and resources and are done by teams of defense lawyers and experts, he said.
“Someone representing themselves is not going to be able to put on that kind of case,” Garrett said.
Is death for Dylann Roof justified?
The steep drop in death penalty cases can be attributed to strong improvements in capital defense teams around the country, as well as less cities and counties pursuing the death penalty due to budgetary and other reasons, he said.
Texas, which leads all states with 538 executions since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, is also seeing a decline in death penalty cases. Death sentences have declined from a peak of 48 in 1999 to just three in 2015 and three last year, said Kristin Houlé, executive director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
Harris County in Texas, which has executed more prisoners than any other U.S. state except for Texas (124), hasn’t seen a death penalty case in two years, she said.
A major reason: the state’s adoption of a life in prison without parole sentence in 2005, Houlé said. “Prosecutors aren’t seeking the death penalty nearly as often as they use to,” she said.
Convicted killer Dylann Roof: 'I am not sorry.'
In a Gallup Poll taken last year, a majority of people across the USA – 60% -- still favor the death penalty, compared to 37% opposing it. But that’s down from 80% who supported the death penalty in 1994 and 16% against it.
In another poll, the Pew Research Center revealed last year that just 49% of Americans say they support capital punishment – the lowest figure in four decades – while 42% oppose it.
But those trends may be slowly reversing, said Michael Rushford, president of the California-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which supports capital punishment. Voters in California, Nebraska and Oklahoma last year voted in support of the death penalty in referendums.
And recent upticks in homicides and mass shootings will also eventually lead to more support for death sentences, he said.
“I’m expecting a pretty big difference,” he said. “We’ll see the ship moving a little further into the harbor.”
But Garrett, the law professor, said he feels the shift away from death sentences is irreversible. “These trends are so long-standing and so engrained,” he said. “I see them continuing.”