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1 Capital Punishment, 1979: Advance Report [1] (1979)

handle is hein.death/cpuar0001 and id is 1 raw text is: 1 - U.S. Department of Justice C Bureau of Justice Statistics Capital Punishment 1979 National Prisoner Statistics Bulletin SD-NPS-CP-8A, N CJ-67705 The execution of one prisoner each in Florida and Nevada during 1979 marked the second and third times that the death penalty has been carried out in the United States since 1967. Although fewer persons were sent to death row than in 1978, the number of those under sentence of death rose by 103 be- cause of a substantial decrease in the number of inmates relieved of the penalty. ' A total of 567 individuals were held under sentence of death in State correctional facilities at the end of 1979. That figure approached the peak re- corded just prior to 1972, when the Furman vs. qeargia decision invalidated most U.S. death penalty laws. The number of jurisdictions au- thorizing capital punishment--38 at yearend-- also came close to the record high of 42 at the time of the Furman decision. In all, 25 States imposed the death penalty during 1979, and 29 held one or more prisoners on death row at yearend. Three women received the death penalty during 1979 and one was removed from death row, bringing to seven the total under sentence of death. All were held in southern States, two in Georgia and one each in Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, -Oklahoma, and Texas. Six of the condemned women were white and one (in Georgia) was black. About 2 out of every 5 death-row inmates were black, roughly the same proportion as in 1978. A total of 25 His- panics, 7 more than a year earlier, were under sentence of death in seven States: Arizona (3), Arkansas (1), California (2), Florida (3), Illinois (1), Texas (14), and Utah (1). The final report will include more detail on persons under sentence of death. Florida continued to hold the largest num- ber of persons under sentence of death (138), followed by Texas (117). These two States combined accounted for 45 percent of all pris- oners under capital sentence at the end of 1979. In all, 11 States had 10 or more per- sons on death row. The most substantial in- crease occurred in Illinois, where the count Advance Report, June 1980 was almost four times larger than at the end of 1978. Both Arizona and California nearly tripled their death-row population. The State with the largest single number of persons sen- tenced to death during 1979 was Florida, with a total of 23. Six other States handed down 10 or more death sentences: Alabama (10), Arizona (16), California (20), Georgia (12), Illinois (14), and Texas (17). All of the Nation's major regions shared in the increase of people sentenced to death. The concentration of death-row inmates in southern States diminished somewhat between the latest two enumerations, from 88 to 81 per- cent of the U.S. total. 2 The West, largely because of a rise in the numbers for Arizona and California, had 13 percent of all inmates at the end of 1979, followed by the North Central region (mainly Illinois) with 6 percent. All four of the death-row prisoners in the North- east were in Pennsylvania, which held none a year earlier. No one was under sentence of death in 1979 in the Federal correctional sys- tem, although Federal law authorized the death penalty for aircraft hijacking resulting in death. The absence of major judicial decisions on capital punishment during 1979 was reflected in the relatively small number of persons relieved of the death sentence as compared with earlier years. Only Rhode Island, with two persons on death row, had its law overturned, whereas four States (Colorado, Massachusetts, New Mexico, and South Dakota) enacted legislation enabling imposition of the death penalty. The laws in the latter four States went into effect during the second half of 1979, but none of these jurisdictions held inmates on death row as of year's end. Data for the National Prisoner Statistics program are collected for the Bureau of Justice Statistics by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. Additional information, including greater detail on the status of the death penalty in each juris- diction, will be contained in a final report, to be issued later this year. Data in this report are preliminary and subject to revision. 'The total reported for December 31, 1978 represents a revision in the figure for the date published in Capital Punishment, 1978, NPS Bulletin SD-NPS-CP-7, December 1979. See footnote to the accompanying table for an expla- nation. 2States included within each region are listed in the table.

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