The Rule of a Barbarous Society. From [HERE] and [HERE] Last year, a journalist asked Dale Cox, then the District Attorney of Caddo Parish, Louisiana, about the wisdom of the death penalty in light of the recent exoneration of Glenn Ford, a Black man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime that he did not commit. Cox told the reporter: “I think we need to kill more people.” “Revenge,” he said, “brings to us a visceral satisfaction.” Between 2010 and 2015, Cox alone secured one-third of Louisiana’s death sentences.
Cox’s disproportionate use of the death penalty illustrates a point that Justice Stephen Breyer recently made. “It is now unusual to nd capital punishment in the United States,”5 Breyer wrote, because “capital prosecutions are being pursued in only a few isolated counties.” There are more than 3,100 counties,7 2,400 head prosecutors, and thousands of line prosecutors in America—yet only a tiny handful of prosecutors are responsible for a vastly disproportionate number of death sentences. The question that this disparity prompts is: Why?
This report analyzes the records of five of America’s deadliest head prosecutors. Three of them personally obtained over 35 death sentences each: Joe Freeman Britt in North Carolina, Bob Macy in Oklahoma, and Donnie Myers in South Carolina. These men shared an obsession with winning death sentences at almost any cost. For example, Joe Freeman Britt, who committed misconduct in more than 36%
of his death penalty prosecutions, said: “Within the breast of each of us burns a flame that constantly whispers in our ear ‘preserve life, preserve life, preserve life at any cost.’ It is the prosecutor’s job to extinguish that flame.
The remaining two prosecutors, Lynne Abraham (Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania) and Johnny Holmes (Harris County, Texas), did not personally prosecute as many death penalty cases as the three men above, but nonetheless oversaw the imposition of death sentences against a staggering 10812 and 201 people,13 respectively, during their terms.
Of these five prosecutors, only one—Donnie Myers—remains in of office, and he plans to retire at the end of the year. One of the most remarkable findings from our research is the fact that once these prosecutors and their protégés left their positions, death sentences dramatically declined in these jurisdictions--a pattern that has only become clear in the years since their departures.
We also highlight five additional prosecutors who came very close to becoming members of this notorious group. These runners-up have egregious records in their own states, and like the prosecutors above, the striking drop in new death sentences that has occurred in their respective jurisdictions since their departures illustrates their outsized impact on the death penalty.
Unfortunately, the problem of personality-driven capital sentencing has continued beyond the tenure of these prosecutors. Over the past fteen years, prosecutors have pursued far fewer capital cases and juries have returned far fewer death sentences than in years past. Indeed, in 2015, juries returned just 49 death sentences, the fewest in recent history. This number represents an 84.4% drop from the 1996 high of 315 death verdicts. However, in the increasingly small number of the counties that still actively sentence people to death, a handful of prosecutors dominate death-sentencing statistics.
In the final section of this report, we offer a snapshot of three active prosecutors who, if they continue on their current trajectories, may soon join the ranks of the deadliest prosecutors in America. Taken together, the profiles featured in this report demonstrate that the death penalty has been, and continues to be, a personality- driven system with very few safeguards against misconduct and frequent abuse of power, a fact that seriously undermines its legitimacy. [MORE]