Death penalty by geography

A story in Wednesday’s New York Times described Dale Cox, acting district attorney in Caddo Parish, La., and his opinion that the death penalty is about revenge and that the state needs to “kill more people.”

From 2010 to 2014, more people per capita were sentenced to death in Caddo than in any other county in the United States.

“Retribution is a valid societal interest,” Cox says. In one case last year, he wrote that the defendant “deserves as much physical suffering as it is humanly possible to endure before he dies.”

Cox’s opinions and practices run counter to the national trend in capital cases, in which prosecutors increasingly opt for sentences of life without parole instead of the death penalty and its lengthy and expensive appeals process.

Cox also illustrates the arbitrariness of the death penalty in the U.S., which Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer referred to last week in his dissenting opinion on a lethal injection case.

Breyer wrote that just 29 counties, less than 1 percent of counties in the nation, accounted for half the death sentences from 2004 to 2009.

Geography and prosecutor personality should not determine how our justice system deals with crime, even heinous crime.

This story was originally published July 8, 2015 at 5:42 PM with the headline "Death penalty by geography."