Nevada carries out few death penalty sentences

By Cy Ryan

Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2004 | 11:41 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- A national study says Nevada leads the nation in imposing the death penalty, but executions are actually few and far between in this state.

The last person executed in Nevada was Sebastian Bridges on April 21, 2001. Only nine people have been put to death in the state since reinstatement of capital punishment more than 25 years ago.

A study in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies found Nevada had the highest percentage of death sentences among murder cases, at 6 percent. Oklahoma was second at 5.1 percent, according to the report. The study looked at numbers from 1976 to 1998.

Texas and Virginia, states that have reputations for favoring the death penalty, had percentages of only 2 percent and 1.3 percent respectively. The national median was 2 percent.

That may be true, said Assemblywoman Sheila Leslie, D-Reno, who headed a committee studying the death penalty for the last legislative session. That study showed Nevada had the highest number of people on death row per capita.

"But what we don't do is carry out executions like Texas," said Leslie, who supported the abolishment of capital punishment.

Michael Pescetta, an assistant federal public defender who specializes in death penalty cases, said he was not surprised by the latest study.

Pescetta said the nine people executed in Nevada since 1977 represents about 10 percent of the total on death row. He suggested that was a high figure. If California put to death 10 percent of those on death row, about 60 would have been executed.

Some states, Pescetta said, have inmates on death row and no executions.

Leslie said the national study shows Nevada is "out of step with the nation. And the nation is out of step with the world" in imposing the death penalty. The United States is one of the few countries that has the death penalty, but it still has a high crime rate, she said.

But Gerald Gardner, chief of the criminal division in the state attorney general's office, said the issue boils down to how the figures are reported. The years since those the study examined have shown a decline, he said.

In 2002 there were 186 murders in Nevada, Gardner said. But in the following year only five people were sentenced to death. He said that computes to 2.5 percent, which the study says is the national average.

In 2001 and 2002 only one person was sentenced to death each year. But there were four death penalty sentences handed out in 2000.

Pescetta said the death sentences seem to run in cycles. He said it peaked in the 1980s with 10 to 12 death penalty cases a year. "That's enormous," he said. But since then, he said, "They have tapered off."

Nevada has 84 people on death row. Gardner said more than 60 of them have appeals pending in the federal court system. Those appeals take years to process.

Of the nine people executed since 1977, all but one voluntarily gave up their appeals and agreed to be put to death. Only Richard Moran, who was executed on March 30, 1996, had exhausted his appeals.

One of the reasons for the high number of people on death row, Pescetta said, was that Nevada makes it easier to prosecute and seek capital punishment. He said the prosecution can use a number of factors to show aggravating circumstances to merit a death sentence.

"The easier you make it, the more people there are on the row," Pescetta said.

The author of the national study was Theodore Eisenberg, a law professor at Cornell University. It was sponsored by the Cornell Law School Death Penalty Project, which provides legal services to death row inmates.

Gardner said no executions are imminent. The closest was Edward Bennett, he said, but the Nevada Supreme Court last December ordered a new penalty hearing for Bennett, sentenced to death for the fatal shooting of a convenience store clerk during a robbery in Las Vegas in 1988.

Bennett and his accomplice Joseph Beeson entered a Stop N' Go Market Feb. 8, 1988, with the intent to rob it, according to court records. Bennett shot clerk Michelle Moore, 21, a newlywed, in the face. Beeson, who has since died, wounded a customer who ran from the store.

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to decide a case that could entitle 14 of Nevada's death row inmates to new penalty hearings. The court will decide whether to make retroactive a previous ruling that juries, not judges, must decide if a person should be sentenced to death.

Pescetta said 10 men on Nevada's death row pleaded guilty and were sentenced to death by a three-judge panel. In another four cases, the jury could not decide and the sentencing was passed to a three-judge panel, which handed down the death penalty in all four cases.

No hearing date has been set by the Supreme Court.

Gardner said a ruling by the Supreme Court may end up affecting only the four cases with hung juries.

Leslie said Nevada prosecutors seek the death penalty too often and she hoped there might be other alternatives.

She expected a bill to be introduced in the 2005 Legislature to repeal capital punishment but she does not expect it to pass. She said abolishment does not have widespread support in Nevada, where there is still a "frontier West culture."

But she said the U.S. Supreme Court may eventually outlaw the death penalty. It stopped the execution of mentally retarded persons and is now considering stopping executions for teens, she said.