More death row convicts were executed in the United States this year than last, but juries continue to grow more wary of capital punishment, according to a new report. News from The New York Times.

Death sentences handed down by judges and juries in 2009 continued a trend of decline for seven years in a row, with 106 projected for the year. That level is down two-thirds from a peak of 328 in 1994, according to the report being released Friday by the Death Penalty Information Center, a research organization that opposes capital punishment.

“This entire decade has been marked by a declining use of the death penalty,” said Richard Dieter, the executive director of the group.

The sentencing drop was most striking in Texas, which averaged 34 death sentences a year in the 1990s and had 9 this year. Vic Wisner, a former assistant district attorney in Houston, said a “constant media drumbeat” about suspect convictions and exonerations “has really changed the attitude of jurors.”

Mr. Wisner said that while polls showed continued general support for capital punishment, “there is a real worry by jurors of, ‘I believe in it, but what if we later find out it was someone else and it’s too late to do anything about it?’ ”

In 2005, Texas juries were given the option of sentencing defendants to life without parole.

While death sentences are in decline, executions rose in the past year, according to the new report. Fifty-two prisoners have been put to death in 2009, compared with 42 in 2007 and 37 in 2008.

The report also noted that in 2009 New Mexico became the 15th state to repeal the death penalty, in part because of budget considerations and the high cost of death penalty appeals, which Gov. Bill Richardson called “a valid reason” for eliminating the ultimate sanction “in this era of austerity and tight budgets.”

But Kent Scheidegger, the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which supports capital punishment, argued that the decline in death sentences also corresponded to a decline in the murder rate, and criticized efforts to use cost arguments against the death penalty. The government could “knock a large chunk off of the cost” of execution by streamlining the review process, he said.

Douglas A. Berman, an expert on sentencing law at Ohio State University, suggested that the rise in executions was due to last year’s relatively low number, as states grappled with the implications of a major 2008 Supreme Court decision on lethal injection.

In that case, Baze v. Rees, the court ended what amounted to a moratorium of several months, beginning in 2007, on lethal injection executions by proclaiming that the procedure used in Kentucky and other states with similar methods did not violate the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

This “post-Baze echo” in the figures, Mr. Berman said, can be seen in the execution in Ohio this month of Kenneth Biros. It came after a legal challenge to Ohio’s protocol, a botched execution under the state’s three-drug method for another prisoner, and a shift to a one-drug execution method. While other court challenges to lethal injection are proceeding around the country, he said, Ohio’s action suggests that “states are moving forward.”

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Small Box, a new opera set in a death row visiting room, will have its world premiere in Bloomington next month.  Reported by Linda Greene, in the Bloomington Alternative.

With music by Herman Whitfield III and a libretto by Bruce L. Pearson, the one-act, hour-long opera takes a serious look at the death penalty without arguing either for or against.

“The opera,” Pearson said in a phone interview, “offers a fairly typical cross-section of those who find their way to death row.” With Small Box he hopes to “make people think by presenting a realistic view of prison life.” The raw material, Pearson said, “is from getting to know the guys on the row.”

Pearson is an Indianapolis native who lives in Bloomington and holds degrees from Earlham College, Indiana University and the University of California at Berkeley. He taught anthropology and linguistics at the University of South Carolina for 31 years before retiring to Bloomington.

During his years in South Carolina, Pearson taught college classes in the state prison and later worked as a volunteer teacher and counselor in the prison’s death row unit. Every incident in the opera has actually taken place, some on death rows in places other than South Carolina.

The opera has a cast of eight — six men and two women. Two of the men are prison officers assigned to the death row visiting room. The officer in charge is an older man, whose assistant is a new officer, still learning the ropes after two weeks on the job.

One inmate is a multiple murderer who, because of a judge’s error, had his death sentence reduced to life in prison. He works as the unit’s janitor. Among the other inmates is a mentally retarded man who is visited by his attorney, a young woman. Another is a mentally deranged youth who heard voices telling him to go to a schoolyard and shoot the children there. Finally, there is a young man who was involved in a murder for which his partner has already been executed. He has now received an execution date and receives a visit from his wife and infant son.

Whitifield, the composer, is a two-time winner of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s Emerging African-American Composers competition. His works have been performed by the Detroit Symphony, the Indianapolis Symphony and other orchestras. He is an adjunct professor of music at Martin University in Indianapolis.

Whitfield studied at IU, the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Oberlin Conservatory. He has composed music for films and was selected as a participant in the 2007 Aspen Music Festival and the School’s Film Scoring Institute. At Indiana, he studied piano performance and political science. At the Cleveland Institute he studied orchestral conducting. Small Box is his first opera, and he will conduct the premiere performance.

The stage director is Lesley Delk, a Bloomington-based soprano enrolled in the doctoral program in operatic stage direction at the IU Jacobs School of Music.

Small Box is the product of a “happy collaboration” by the librettist and composer. After he finished the libretto, Pearson joined the Composers’ Forum and placed a notice in its newsletter indicating that he was looking for someone to write the music for the libretto. One of the respondents was Whitfield, and after extensive conversations, the two recognized that they were “on the same wavelength.” Pearson and Whitfield plan to work together on the rest of a trilogy of operas, the remaining two not yet set to music.

The performance is sponsored by the Bloomington Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and the statewide Indiana Information Center to Abolish Capital Punishment.

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In this time of economic turmoil some legislators in Kansas and elsewhere say the price of justice is too high. They have introduced legislation to take the death penalty off the books over financial concerns. CNN reports.

“Because of the downturn in the national economy, we are facing one of the largest budget deficits in our history,” state Sen. Carolyn McGinn, a Republican, said in an opinion piece posted on TheKansan.com Friday. “What is certain is we are all going to have to look at new and creative ways to fund state and community programs and services.”   The state would save more than $500,000 per case by not seeking the death penalty, McGinn wrote, money that could be used for “prevention programs, community corrections and other programs to decrease future crimes against society” …

A 2008 study by the Urban Institute, an economic and social policy research group based in Maryland, found that an average capital murder trial in the state resulting in a death sentence costs about $3 million, or $1.9 million more than a case where the death penalty is not sought.  A similar 2008 study by the ACLU in Northern California found that a death- penalty trial costs about $1.1 million more than a non-death-penalty trial in California …

New Mexico, which also has a bill before the Legislature to abolish the death penalty, has already seen a case where costs dictated the outcome. Last year, the New Mexico attorney general’s office agreed to drop the death penalty for two inmates involved in the stabbing death of a guard, Ralph Garcia, during a 1999 riot at the Guadalupe County Correctional Facility.   The change came after the state Legislature failed to provide additional funding for defense attorneys contracted to handle the case by the public defender’s office.  In court documents filed at the time, Attorney General Gary King said his office could not “in good faith under these circumstances” pursue the death penalty against Robert Young and Reis Lopez …

In Colorado, House Bill 1274 proposes to put the anticipated savings from abolishing the death penalty toward the Colorado Bureau of Investigation’s cold case homicide team.

Other States with bills for an economic end to the death penalty include Washington, Montana, Nebraska, Texas and New Hampshire.

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The following opinion piece was written for the LA Times by Jeanne Woodford, former director of the California Department of Corrections, and former Warden of San Quentin State prison.

As the warden of San Quentin, I presided over four executions. After each one, someone on the staff would ask, “Is the world safer because of what we did tonight?”  We knew the answer: No.

I worked in corrections for 30 years, starting as a correctional officer and working my way up to warden at San Quentin and then on to the top job in the state — director of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. During those years, I came to believe that the death penalty should be replaced with life without the possibility of parole.I didn’t reach that conclusion because I’m soft on crime. My No. 1 concern is public safety. I want my children and grandchildren to have the safety and freedom to pursue their dreams. I know from firsthand experience that some people are dangerous and must be removed from society forever — people such as Robert Lee Massie.

I presided over Massie’s execution in 2001. He was first sentenced to death for the 1965 murder of a mother of two. But when executions were temporarily banned in 1972, his sentence was changed to one that would allow parole, and he was released in 1978. Months later, he killed a 61-year-old liquor store owner and was returned to death row. For supporters of the death penalty, Massie is a poster child. Yet for me, he stands out among the executions I presided over as the strongest example of how empty and futile the act of execution is.

I remember I did my job, but I don’t believe it was the right thing to have done. We should have condemned Massie to permanent imprisonment — that would have made the world safer. But on the night we executed him, when the question was asked, “Did this make the world safer?” the answer remained no. Massie needed to be kept away from society, but we did not need to kill him. that night clearly. It was March 27, 2001. I was the last person to talk to Massie before he died. After that, I brought in the witnesses. I looked at the clock to make sure it was after midnight. I got a signal from two members of my staff who were on the phone with the state Supreme Court and the U.S. attorney general’s office to make sure there were no last-minute legal impediments to the execution. There was none, so I gave the order to proceed. It took several minutes for the lethal injections to take effect.Why should we pay to keep him locked up for life? I hear that question constantly. Few people know the answer: It’s cheaper — much, much cheaper than execution.  I wish the public knew how much the death penalty affects their wallets. California spends an additional $117 million each year pursuing the execution of those on death row. Just housing inmates on death row costs an additional $90,000 per prisoner per year above what it would cost to house them with the general prison population. A statewide, bipartisan commission recently concluded that we must spend $100 million more each year to fix the many problems with capital punishment in California. Total price tag: in excess of $200 million a year more than simply condemning people to life without the possibility of parole.

If we condemn the worst offenders, like Massie, to permanent imprisonment, resources now spent on the death penalty could be used to investigate unsolved homicides, modernize crime labs and expand effective violence prevention programs, especially in at-risk communities. The money also could be used to intervene in the lives of children at risk and to invest in their education — to stop future victimization.  As I presided over Massie’s execution, I thought about the abuse and neglect he endured as a child in the foster care system. We failed to keep him safe, and our failure contributed to who he was as an adult. Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to kill him, what if we spent that money on other foster children so that we stop producing men such as Massie in the first place?

As director of corrections, I visited the Watts district in Los Angeles and met with some ex-offenders. I learned that the prison system is paroling 300 people every week into the neighborhood without a plan or resources for success. How can we continue to spend more than $100 million a year seeking the execution of a handful of offenders while we fail to meet the basic safety needs of communities such as Watts?  It is not realistic to think that Watts and neighborhoods like it will ever get well if we can’t — or won’t — support them in addressing the problems they face.

To say that I have regrets about my involvement in the death penalty is to let myself off the hook too easily. To take a life in order to prove how much we value another life does not strengthen our society. It is a public policy that devalues our very being and detracts crucial resources from programs that could truly make our communities safe.

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• San Luis Obispo CA needs to solve overcrowding for women
• Florida reports that death row inmates cost about 50% than general population.
• Grayson County TX needs a new jail — but not near me!
• Canyon County ID balances budget by delaying jail building

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The New Hampshire Department of Corrections has a lot of work to do. The federal government is requiring New Hampshire to execute convicted murder Gary Sampson. And Attorney General Kelly Ayotte is seeking the death penalty in the murder cases against Michael Addison and John Brooks. But right now the state doesn’t have a place to put people to death- it doesn’t even have a death row. New Hampshire Public Radio’s Dan Gorenstein looked into just what New Hampshire must do to prepare. Select here for the audio broadcast. And here is the written transcript.

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