Death Penalty - Delay

In the US, jail and prison are not interchangeable terms.  Jail is where defendants are held awaiting trial and is effectively the equivalent of being remanded in custody.  Prison is where convicted inmates serve out their sentence.  A person charged with a capital offence can easily spend five or six years in jail waiting for their case to come to trial.  This means that completely innocent people may spend five or six years in jail before being acquitted in court.

Following a sentence of death, a person is sent to death row to await their execution.  Conditions are generally similar to solitary confinement.  The inmate is usually locked up for 23 hours a day in a single cell.  They have no access to the educational or employment programmes available to other prisoners and their visiting and exercise times are restricted.  Under normal prison conditions, solitary confinement is perceived as a particularly severe punishment and can only be used for very limited periods.  However, death row inmates spend an average of ten years waiting for execution.

While ten years is the average, some inmates spend in excess of 20 years on death row.  Gary Alvord in Florida currently holds the dubious honour of being the longest serving death row inmate in the US.  He was sentenced in 1973 and has been on death row continuously ever since.

The delay is normally due to the complexity and slowness of the appeals process.  It is understandably a source of some controversy and debate.  While many inmates are grateful for every day they remain alive, a prolonged time spent in death row conditions can cause a myriad of mental health problems.  This is often referred to as death row syndrome or the death row phenomenon.