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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: December 17, 2014
(SALEM, Oregon) Death sentences in Oregon declined in 2014, with only one new death sentence this year. This single sentence represents a 42% decline over the last ten years. According to the 2014 Death Penalty report, issued today by the Death Penalty Information Center, in Washington DC, nationwide, there were 72 new death sentences in 2014, a 40-year low.

By William Saletan, on June 19, 2014 at 5:03 AM

WASHINGTON — For 40 years American politicians have assumed that favoring the death penalty is a winning political position. Is that era coming to an end? Is support for capital punishment, like opposition to gay marriage, evaporating?

We can't be sure. But we're seeing the first signs that it could happen.

By Frank Thompson, a retired prison superintendent from the Oregon Department of Corrections.
Because of the moratorium that Gov. John Kitzhaber declared, the gruesome events that unfolded during the execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma did not happen here. But for our governor's bold leadership, it could have. Oklahoma officials injected Mr. Lockett with a "newly tried" cocktail of drugs that caused him to "writhe and gasp" and cry out in pain minutes after he'd been declared unconscious. At one point, he "tried to rise [from the table] and exhaled loudly," prompting prison officials to pull a curtain in front of witnesses. An execution that should have taken little more than 10 minutes was stretched to an agonizing 43 minutes and ended with Mr. Lockett dying of a massive heart attack. Our constitution requires that, if a state wishes to use the death penalty, we must guarantee that it is not cruel punishment. And for good reason.

EUGENE — A Lane County jury has agreed that a Eugene man who's twice been convicted of killings should be executed. The jury reached its decision Thursday in the case of 58-year-old David Ray Taylor, convicted last week in the 2012 killing of Celestino Gutierrez. Prosecutors said Gutierrez was killed so that his car could be used as a getaway vehicle in a bank robbery a few hours after he was killed. Taylor previously served 27 years for the killing of a young Eugene woman in 1977. He was released in 2004. Prosecutors said the killing of Gutierrez was done at Taylor's home, and he planned it along with younger associates, one of whom posed as a stranded woman in a bar parking lot and asked Gutierrez for a ride. After Gutierrez was killed, his body was dismembered and buried in a forest southwest of Eugene, The Register-Guard reported. "This is a rare, extreme case, and exactly what the death penalty was intended for," Lane County Deputy District Attorney David Schwartz told the jury.