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Only 1 out of 100 convicted of murderers are sentenced to death. Those who are sentenced to death are not necessarily those whose crimes are the worst but  rather, they tend to be the poor, people of color, and those whose victims are white.

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Only 1 out of 100 convicted of murderers are sentenced to death. Those who are sentenced to death are not necessarily those whose crimes are the worst but  rather, they tend to be the poor, people of color, and those whose victims are white.

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Robert Smith, the lead researcher, proved that many people who are put to death are not cold killers. Most of them actually have a reason to why they did what they did.

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Daniel Cook was put to death on August 8, 2012

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Daniel Cook was put to death on August 8, 2012

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Daniel cook as a young age was abused by his mother and grandparents. They molested him, and his father burned his genitals. He was soon sent into foster care where nothing had changed.

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Daniel's foster parent raped him, and other adults watched. He then killed them, and was sentenced to the death penalty. But the prosecutor said if he knew daniels past, he would've never brought up the death penalty.

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The last 100 people executed in America 

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The last 100 people executed in America 

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Out of the last 100, most of them had suffered from mental illnesses and trauma. Also those who did end up being executed did not have an adequate representation at the trial.

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It is important to have good legal representation

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It is important to have good legal representation

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One of the main reasons why people get sentenced to the death penalty and don't end up having a fair trial is because of the lawyers they have. Many cannot afford a good enough lawyer. These lawyers are usually the ones with the least resources.

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The Supreme Court found that severe childhood trauma can be a mitigating factor in a defendant's case. 

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The Supreme Court found that severe childhood trauma can be a mitigating factor in a defendant's case. 

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It should matter to a jury as to why the defendant did what he or she did, especially is is was a traumatic as Daniel Cook.

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A new study suggests that the people put to death in America are hardly the worst of the worst offenders.

The study, published in Hastings Law Journal, looked at 100 executions between 2012 and 2013. Some of the most striking results are displayed in the graphic.

Story continues below ...

Robert Smith, the study's lead researcher and an assistant professor of law at the University of North Carolina, told The Huffington Post his research provides evidence that many of the people who are actually put to death are not cold, calculating, remorseless killers.

"A lot of folks even familiar with criminal justice and the death penalty system thought that, by the time you executed somebody, you're really gonna get these people that the court describes as the worst of the worst," Smith said. "It was surprising to us just how many of the people that we found had evidence in their record suggesting that there are real problems with functional deficits that you wouldn't expect to see in people being executed."

One of the people in Smith's study is Daniel Cook. Cook's mom drank and used drugs while she was pregnant with him. His mother and grandparents molested him and his dad abused him by, among other things, burning his genitals with a cigarette.

As Harvard Law Professor Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. documents in the Washington Post, Cook was later placed in foster care, where a "foster parent chained him nude to a bed and raped him while other adults watched from the next room through a one-way mirror."

The prosecutor who presented the death penalty case against Cook said he never would have put execution on the table if he had known about the man's brutal past. Nonetheless, Cook was put to death on Aug. 8, 2012.

In various landmark cases, the Supreme Court has found that executing people with an intellectual disability or severe mental illness can be a violation of the Eighth Amendment, which bars cruel and unusual punishment.

The court has also found that severe childhood trauma can be a mitigating factor in a defendant's case, according to a press release accompanying the report.

But Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, said there are serious flaws with the study's methodology. He noted that the authors count someone as intellectually disabled if they score below a 70 on at least one IQ test. However, he said, looking at the lowest score in a series of tests can be misleading.

"How fast can you run a mile? If you run on several different days and have several different times, the speed at which you can do it is your fastest time," Scheidegger said in an email to HuffPost. "Various factors can make you perform less than your best, including simply not trying hard, but nothing can make you perform better than your best. It's the same with IQ scores. The high score is a good indication of performance. The low score means practically nothing."

Scheidegger also said mitigating factors like intellectual disability or a traumatic childhood don't matter nearly as much as the brutality of the crimes that death row inmates have committed.

"Since 1978, defendants have had carte blanche to introduce everything including the kitchen sink in mitigation," Scheidegger said. "The actions of their attorneys in finding and presenting that evidence is scrutinized repeatedly in the years after the trial. What we see in case after case is that even after years of reinvestigation and relitigation, the horrifying facts of the crime remain far more than sufficient to outweigh the minimally relevant evidence in mitigation."

But Smith said the courts have found that, independent of the heinousness of the crime, the prosecution must also show that the defendant is "morally culpable."

"The Eighth Amendment requires that the death penalty be limited in its application to only those offenders who commit the most aggravated homicides and who possess the most aggravated moral culpability," Smith said.

"But our research showed that of the last 100 people we executed in America, most of them had severe functional deficits. In many cases, they suffered from several mental illness and years of horrific abuse. And the problem is that there is no standard measurement for these type of functional deficits. For instance, there is no IQ score equivalent for gauging the functional deficits that mark any particular person with a severe mental illness."

Smith also said those who ended up executed did not have adequate representation at the trial level. Juries were often not informed of defendants' intellectual or mental health problems or their family history of extreme abuse.

Smith noted that the reason traumatic childhoods are brought up is not necessarily to make juries feel bad for the person on trial, but because "decades of research" has shown that these types of trauma can trigger the kinds of "functional deficits" that were present in many of the cases examined in the report.

"We're executing people who get the worst lawyers, have the least resources and are the most vulnerable," Smith said.

Sometimes these mitigating factors come out during the appeals process, but by then it may be too late, since judges often give deference to the jury's verdict.

"It's often a tale told too late," Smith said. "How many of these people would have not even come close to dying if they had had good lawyers at trial or pre-trial?"

With executions either being outlawed or rarely used in many parts of the country, Smith said the punishment's days may be numbered.

"We're not talking about reform," Smith said. "We're talking about it being on its way out."

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'The Worst Of The Worst' Aren't The Only Ones Who Get Executed (INFOGRAPHIC)

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A new study suggests that the people put to death in America are hardly the worst of the worst offenders. The study, published in Hastings Law Journal, looked at 100 executions between 2012 and 2013. Some of the most striking results are displayed in the graphic. Story continues below ...

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Each of these facts address a common misperception about the death penalty - use them to stimulate civil dialogue to advance public will for abolition. Download a PDF Flyer with this info (for printing and distributing).

1. The death penalty is not a deterrent to violent crime. Consistent with previous years, the 2010 FBI Uniform Crime Report showed that the South had the highest murder rate and accounts for over 80% of executions. The Northeast & West have the lowest murder rates and hold less than 1% of all executions.

2. The death penalty costs more than life imprisonment.It costs taxpayers from $2 to $5 million per death sentence for the trials and appeals. Life in prison averages $1 million (40 years at $25,000/year). Louisiana State Attorney General, & former District Attorney, says that he can try a second-degree murder case for $15,000-20,000 instead of $250,000 for a death penalty trial.

3. Innocent people get executed. Of 350 persons mistakenly convicted of potentially capital crimes, 139 were sentenced to death, and 23 were actually executed. Researchers say that there are probably many more cases not yet identified. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 163 people have been exonerated after years on death rows. 10 of these are from Oklahoma.

4. The death penalty perpetuates violent crime. As a symbol of "being tough on crime," the death penalty helps politicians get elected. Since it does not reduce violent crime, it wastes resources. States that have abolished the death penalty can redirect the money saved into programs that actually reduce violent crime.

5. Racism #1: Minority defendants are more likely than white defendants to be sentenced to death for the same crimes. Research into sentencing patterns shows that blacks are three to four times as likely to be sentenced to death as whites charged in similar cases.

6. Racism #2: The death penalty punishes primarily those who kill whites. Although homicide victims are six times more likely to be black than white, 77 percent of death penalty cases involve white victims..

7. Poor people are executed much more often than wealthy murderers. Over 99% of the people on death row are indigent, according to one U.S. Appeals Court judge. Persons of all income levels commit murder, but poor people are the primary recipients of the death penalty.

8. Mentally ill people are executed. Even though the law forbids the execution of those who are mentally ill, experience shows that the determination of sanity is generally made after very limited contact with the accused, often by psychiatrists employed by the prosecution. Inevitably, some who are ill are declared "sane," and fit for execution.

9. Inconsistent sentencing. Only one out of 100 convicted of murder is sentenced to death. Those sentenced to death are not necessarily those whose crimes are the worst - rather, they tend to be the poor, people of color, and those whose victims are white.

10. Public support for the death penalty is decreasing. When offered a range of sentencing options, respondents in several polls have shown a preference for life imprisonment rather than execution.

11. Many Victims' families oppose the death penalty. Connecticut's successful campaign to abolish the death penalty was led by family members of murder victims with statements like this, "If we are serious about caring for victims, we will repeal the death penalty. It only prolongs pain for families as it inevitably drags out the legal process and leaves families in limbo waiting for an execution that may never come."'

12. Only the U.S. of all industrialized nations & western democracies still use the death penalty since South Africa has renounced it and the USSR no longer exists.

Louisiana Prosecutors Deeply Concerned about Costs of the Death Penalty

Citing the costs of seeking the death penalty, Louisiana prosecutors are "cutting way back," according to State Attorney General Buddy Caldwell. A former district attorney, Caldwell compared trying a capital case to "playing on a $100-a-roll table instead of a nickel or dime table." He explained that he could try a second-degree murder case for $15,000 to $20,000 instead of $250,000 to put a death-penalty defendant on trial. Caldwell said the cost of expert witnesses and investigators was one reason for the price difference.

District attorney Linda Watson said the costs of prosecuting a capital case are too much, especially for an impoverished region. Since parishes usually have to pay for legal defense costs and housing for jurors during trials, in addition to the prosecutor's expert witnesses and investigators, her office usually pursues life in prison instead. "The cost of a death penalty case is unbelievable," Watson said.

Governor Bill Richardson Signs Bill Abolishing Death Penalty in >New Mexico

March 18, 2009 New Mexico became the 15th state to abandon capital punishment and the 3rd in the last 2 years, following recent actions in New Jersey and New York in 2007. The new law substitutes the punishment of life without parole for the death penalty in future cases. In a statement, Gov. Richardson cited the 130 inmates freed from death row since 1973 and added

" The sad truth is the wrong person can still be convicted in this day and age, and in cases where that conviction carries with it the ultimate sanction, we must have ultimate confidence, I would say certitude, that the system is without flaw or prejudice. Unfortunately, this is demonstrably not the case. "

Many family members of murder victims applauded the repeal: "This is recognition of the false promise that the death penalty offered, and a realization of how murder victims' family members' needs can truly be served," said Lorry Post, Executive Director of Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation (MVFR).

Cathy Ansheles of Santa Fe and a member of MVFR, reacted to the bill's passage, "It's a great relief to know that families will no longer be put through the turmoil of the death penalty. Finally, resources can be directed to where they will really do the most good."

In his statement, Gov. Richardson noted, " While today's focus will be on the repeal of the death penalty, I want to make clear that this bill I'm signing actually makes New Mexico safer. With my signature, we now have the option of sentencing the worst criminals to life in prison without the possibility of parole. They will never get out of prison. Faced with the reality that our system for imposing the death penalty can never be perfect, my conscience compels me to replace the death penalty with a solution that keeps society safe." A statewide poll in 2008 had shown that 64% of New Mexicans supported replacing the death penalty with life without parole and restitution to victims' families.

Kentucky's Public Defender Faces Shutdown-Legal Experts Call for DP Moratorium

Several legal authorities and public officials are calling on Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear to suspend the death penalty pending resolution of the state's budget crisis. Kentucky's public defender system will exhaust its current budget by May 21 with two months remaining in the fiscal year, forcing it to shut down. "The budget shortfall creates a likelihood that counsel will be unavailable or unable to properly proceed, thereby jeopardizing prosecutions and resulting in flawed, unreliable outcomes, expanded litigation and reversal of convictions," said Daniel T. Goyette, Chief Public Defender for Jefferson County and an Adjunct Professor at the Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville. " As a former Commonwealth's Attorney, I see insurmountable legal obstacles to prosecuting death penalty cases when the defendants are not adequately represented by counsel for any reason, including a budget crisis," added Marc S. Murphy, former Jefferson County Commonwealth's Attorney. " The constitution guarantees an accused defendant the right to have effective assistance of counsel" said Robert G. Lawson, former dean of the University of Kentucky College of Law, who has been extensively involved in law reform efforts in Kentucky as principal drafter of the Kentucky Penal Code. " We are hearing from the people in the defender system that they are unable to render effective assistance due to the budget cuts. I support a moratorium on executions at this time."

Former Kentucky Supreme Court Justice James E. Keller of Lexington said: " I'm not opposed in principle to the death penalty, but at this time I support a moratorium on the death penalty while the state reviews whether it should be retained, or at least reviews how it has been implemented since it has been reinstated."

Another legal expert, Chase Law School Professor Michael J. Z. Mannheimer, an authority on federal death penalty cases, said, "Prosecuting and defending capital cases causes such a drain on public resources that I believe the death penalty to be unwise even in normal times. In the current economic environment, pushing ahead with capital cases and actual executions is fiscally irresponsible."

Death Penalty Information Center, www.deathpenaltyinfo.org, Postings March 2009

PDF of above info: Facts About the Death Penalty 2013

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Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty

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Each of these facts address a common misperception about the death penalty - use them to stimulate civil dialogue to advance public will for abolition. Download a PDF Flyer with this info (for printing and distributing). The death penalty is not a deterrent to violent crime.