Both executions and death sentences have fallen sharply in recent years in America



DURING the night of September 21st two prisoners were executed in America. Lawrence Brewer, a member of a white-supremacist gang convicted of dragging a black man to death behind a pick-up truck in 1998, died in Texas. Troy Davis, a black man convicted of killing an off-duty white policeman in 1989, was put to death in Georgia after international protest over the quality of the evidence against him proved fruitless. Their deaths brought the number of executions in America so far this year to 35. The charts below show two interesting trends. The first is the sharp fall in both executions and death sentences in recent years in America. The second is the increasing lag between sentencing and execution. And killing a white person seems disproportionately likely to secure a death sentence. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's latest figures, for 2009, show virtually identical numbers of black and white victims of homicide, yet on NAACP figures capital crimes against whites lead to three-quarters of all death sentences.

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