Death Row Study Finds Many Repeaters

Nearly a third of the 1,405 convicts under death sentence in U.S. prisons in 1984 were in trouble with the law at the time they committed the killings that put them on Death Row, a Justice Department agency said Sunday.

According to a report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 219 of the 424 prisoners in this category were on parole when they committed the capital offenses for which they were serving time, while 60 were on probation and another 61 faced prosecution on pending charges.

An additional 37 were convicts who had killed fellow inmates, and 29 others were escaped prisoners who had committed murders while free. The remaining 18 had been released from prison before expiration of their terms for a variety of reasons.

The report, “Capital Punishment 1984,” said that all of the 1,388 men and 17 women under death sentence at the year’s end had been found guilty of murder. Of these, 856--nearly two-thirds of them--had been convicted of felonies before they were found guilty on capital charges, and 104 had a prior homicide conviction.

More than half the total number of condemned prisoners were in 15 Southern and border states, where all 21 of the executions carried out in 1984 took place, and where 782 convicts faced death sentences as the year ended.

Southern States Figures

There were more than 100 prisoners on Death Row in each of four states, three of which were members of the old Confederacy: Florida, with 215, where eight prisoners were executed in 1984; Texas, with 178 prisoners and three executions, and Georgia, with 111 on Death Row and two executions last year.

Ranked third in the number of prisoners under death sentence was California, where 172 faced the death penalty. Although California is one of the 37 states that authorize capital punishment, there has not been an execution in the state since 1967, when authorities nationwide withheld imposition of the death penalty pending the outcome of challenges to capital punishment.

The Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, and there was one execution, in Utah, in 1977. There were 10 more nationwide in the next six years, then 21 in 1984 alone.

In an appendix, the report weighed charges that the death penalty is applied in a way that discriminates against minorities. It conceded that “there is no dispute that the proportion of blacks under sentence of death in the United States (42% at the end of 1984) is much higher than the proportion of blacks in the general population (12%),” but it contended that the difference fails to prove discrimination.

Race Argument Rebutted

Arguing that a comparison between the population under death sentence and the number of offenders is “much more relevant,” it offered figures indicating that white killers are more likely to draw a death penalty than blacks.

In the five-year period beginning in 1980, the report said, blacks constituted 48.5% of adults arrested for murder and non-negligent manslaughter, against 40.9% of those admitted to prison under a sentence of death. On the other hand, it said, whites made up 50.2% of those arrested for the crimes and 57.9% of those entering prison under death sentence.