LOUISIANA/USA: Death row has quiet year in La. -- Lack of executions may signify eroding support for sentence

Louisiana executed none of its 93 death row inmates in 2001, as the national number of executions fell 22 % from the previous year's total. It was the 2nd consecutive year since the return of the death penalty in 1976 that the total declined -- a 1st for the country.

 Better lawyering, especially on appeals, a lower murder rate and fewer death sentences likely combined to keep Louisiana's death chamber empty for an entire year, but experts are split on what the year without executions means. Anti-death penalty activists see it as a sign the public and their elected leaders have lost the taste for capital punishment, while some say the zero statistic has little significance.

 "Basically, the assembly line is processing people and we will continue to execute that many people each year," said Burk Foster, a criminal justice professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who has studied the death penalty for decades.

 "It's not really indicative of any kind of sharp change of policy," Foster said. "It's just the pace has been very slow the last decade."

 Slow, but most certainly still sure. The state has executed an average of 1 person a year since 1990, though there were years such as 1994 and 1998 when no one was put to death.

 Several of the men on death row at the Angola state prison have had sentences reversed or remanded and no longer are awaiting lethal injection. But many of Louisiana's death row cases are older than a decade, and time might be running out.

 The appeals process has virtually dried up for Leslie Dale Martin, who could face an execution date this year for the 1991 rape and murder of 19-year-old Christina Burgin in Calcasieu Parish.

 Changing attitudes

 Defense lawyers on the front lines of death penalty law found Louisiana's lack of a single execution in 2001 encouraging.

 "No state is rallying around to get rid of the death penalty just yet," said lawyer Nick Trenticosta, who has long devoted his practice to death row cases. "But the public has a whole different view of the death penalty because in the last few years, people are waking up to find out this is ridiculous and too costly a venture that doesn't make any sense at all."

 The country has witnessed significant numbers of capital cases being reversed on appeal along with fewer death sentences, Trenticosta added. A recent Columbia University study reported that between 1973 and 1995, 68 % of the nation's death penalty convictions were reversed. But the study was criticized by prosecutors and judges as biased against the death penalty.

 The 1 statistic that can't be disputed is the death toll. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty, Louisiana has executed 26 people.

 The last inmate to die on the state's lethal injection table at Angola was Feltus Taylor, 39, who was convicted of the 1991 murder of Donna Ponsano during a robbery of a fast-food restaurant in Baton Rouge that also left the manager partially paralyzed.

 Louisiana's death penalty law is reserved for 1st-degree murder and aggravated rape of a child younger than 12. Of the 93 inmates on death row, only 1 is a woman: Former police officer Antoinette Frank, who was convicted of a 1995 triple slaying at a restaurant in eastern New Orleans.

 Although a few death sentences were handed out in Louisiana during 2001, Orleans Parish hasn't done so since 1997, when a jury handed Philip Anthony the ultimate punishment for his role in a triple murder at the Louisiana Pizza Kitchen.

 Historically, jurors in New Orleans have been reluctant to send convicted murderers to their death and have chosen the life sentence that both 2nd- and 1st-degree murder carry.

 States reform laws

 As of Oct. 1, more than 3,700 men and women waited on America's death rows. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, the country has executed 749.

 Louisiana is a law-and-order stalwart, though its death row population has hardly rivaled larger states. Texas had 454 convicts awaiting execution in 2001. California led the country with a death row population of more than 600.

 The United States saw 66 convicts die last year, down from 85 in 2000, according to the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., which advocates abolition of the penalty. In 1999, 98 inmates were executed.

 In its year-end report, the center found that 2001 produced "unprecedented reform" in states where the death penalty is active. 5 states, including Florida and Missouri, banned the execution of mentally retarded convicts, bringing the number of states with such a ban to 18. Louisiana is not among them.

 And 17 states, including Louisiana, passed laws to give inmates access to post-conviction DNA testing.

 Many states improved their systems of appointing defense attorneys for the indigent, the report said, although not all changes were related to the death penalty. Louisiana was one of the states the report called "notable," as were Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas.

 But although legislation to stop the death penalty was introduced in 18 states, none passed. Proposed moratoriums in Maryland and Nevada narrowly failed, and New Mexico returned to the death penalty last year with its 1st execution in 40 years. The federal government followed suit, executing Timothy McVeigh and Juan Garza within days of each other, the 1st federal executions since 1963.

 The South was the deadliest region for capital punishment in 2001, accounting for 79 % of executions. Oklahoma led the nation in executions during 2001 with a record-setting 18 that included 3 women. Texas executed 17 inmates, and Missouri executed seven. North Carolina executed 5, and Georgia, which had no executions in 2000, led 4 people to its death chamber.

 But Georgia also made history last year when its state Supreme Court ruled the electric chair was cruel and unusual punishment, the 1st such ruling in a state court.

 Twelve states, most in the upper Midwest and Northeast, as well as the District of Columbia, prohibit the death sentence.

 Victims groups stand firm

 Many death penalty foes describe 2001's lower execution rate as proof the public's taste for capital punishment is waning. A Gallup poll last May found that nationwide support for the death penalty was at 65 %, 15 points lower than in 1994 and the lowest level in 23 years.

 But Victims and Citizens Against Crime, a Louisiana victims' rights group, hasn't changed its mind. Louisiana has taken great steps to ensure fairness in applying the death penalty in the past decade, said executive director Sandy Krasnoff.

 "We don't want to see the death penalty done away with in the state of Louisiana," he said. "There are some people on death row who committed such horrible crimes, we would like to see them taken sooner because the (victims') families are dragged through it."

 The country's murder rate has declined in tandem with executions. Between 1996 and 2000, the number of murders was down by about 25 %, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

 Another factor has influenced the decline in inmates awaiting execution -- those released after new evidence or successful appeals raised serious questions about their guilt. 5 inmates were freed from death rows in 2001, including Charles Fain, who spent 18 years on Idaho's death row until DNA testing led to his exoneration. Since 1973, 98 people have been freed and exonerated.

 In Louisiana, 2 men walked off death row at the end of 2000. Albert Ronnie Burrell came within 17 days of being executed in 1996 on charges of murdering an elderly couple. He and fellow convicted murderer Michael Ray Graham walked free from Angola's death row after the attorney general's office dismissed the charges because of "a total lack of credible evidence."

 Burrell and Graham had spent 14 years in prison for the murder, after a trial in which prosecutors relied on the testimony of an inmate informant, whose nickname was "Lyin' Wayne."

 No witnesses or physical evidence linked the men to the crime. Both have sued Union and Lincoln Parish officials, seeking $150 million in damages.