Death penalty news

The NYT reports today that legislators in Georgia are talking about changing state law so that non-unanimous juries can impose death sentences. In other words, the determination of guilt will still have to come from all 12 jurors, but if, during the sentencing phase, only 9 support execution, the convict would still face death.

Currently, all death penalty states require a unanimous jury, and it's not clear that changing the law will pass constitutional muster.

The Georgia talk comes after a recent case where a guy was convicted of four homicides but three of the jurors did not vote for a death sentence.

If the prosecution is going to seek the death penalty in a murder trial, the jury will be death-qualified. That means that the members have to say they would be willing to give a death sentence if they deem it appropriate under the law. Death penalty proponents aren't satisfied with the death-qualifying as is, because they point to examples where jurors said they were okay with it but clearly had no intention of considering it during deliberations.

The whole death-qualifying thing is a problem because the resulting juries are not truly 'peers' of the accused -- they are a class of people who are all okay with the death penalty, which is just a subset of society. Studies show these people are more likely to convict (see Adam Liptak's writing on the matter last year).

One solution would be to have two juries -- a first jury that would determine guilt or innocence, and a second, death-qualified jury, that would determine sentencing. Of course, a better solution would be to get rid of the death penalty.

But back to Georgia. Last year the AJC documented extensive flaws in the state's death penalty system -- arbitrariness in sentencing, geographical bias, racial bias (based mostly on the race of the victim), and even outright legal mistakes in the courts. The ABA's study around the same time found many of the same things.

The state legislature seems relatively unswayed by this evidence; they are unlikely to repeal the death penalty any time in the coming years. But jurors are less and less willing to impose death sentences, the AJC found.

Georgia's death penalty story will probably be similar to many other states -- it will be a long, slow decline.