Only one person in Louisiana was sentenced to death this year, David Brown of Lafourche Parish, who was convincted of sexually assaulting, then murdering, a mother and her two daughters before setting their house on fire in 2012.
Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center Robert Dunham says that follows a nationwide trend of an 85 percent decline in death sentences.
“There was a peak in death sentencing in the 1990s, but since then support for the death penalty has dropped dramatically. I think Louisiana pretty much mirrors what we have seen across the country.”
Louisiana did not sentence anyone to death in 2017 and 2016.
Durham attributes the decline in support for the death penalty, even in Bayou State, to public awareness of the extensive legal costs, the difficulty of finding chemicals for lethal injection, and the 11 exonerations for death row inmates in Louisiana since 1900.
“A higher percentage of innocent people have been exonerated from Louisiana’s death row than anywhere else in the country.”
20 states have outlawed the practice, and 10 others have no performed an execution in over a decade.
Durham notes that more than half of all death sentences come from 2 percent of counties, or parishes, in the US. He says there’s two parishes in Louisiana that stand out when it comes to the number of death penalties issued.
“Historically we’ve seen that in East Baton Rouge and Caddo Parish, along with one or two other parishes in Louisiana.”
Louisiana has not performed an execution since 2010.