San Quentin Death Row Inmate Leon Cooper Dies In Hospital

San Quentin death chamber

A San Quentin State Prison death row inmate convicted of the 1998 rape and murder of his stepdaughter in Sacramento County died Wednesday at a nearby hospital, state prison officials said Thursday.

Leon Chauncey Cooper, 54, was pronounced dead at 4:40 p.m. Wednesday. His cause of death is pending the results of an autopsy, according to prison officials.

Cooper was sentenced to death on May 25, 2001, for the rape and murder of his 15-year-old stepdaughter LaRhonda Johnson, a sophomore at Florin High School east of Sacramento, prison officials said.

Cooper had also been previously convicted in 1996 for the sexual battery of Johnson's then-18-year-old sister, according to prison officials.

Since 1978, when California reinstated the death penalty, 66 inmates on death row have died from natural causes, 23 have committed suicide, 13 have been executed in the state, 1 was executed in Missouri, 6 have died from other causes and 2 are pending the cause of death, prison officials said.

Source: CBS news, March 20, 2015

USA: 40 Years of Death Row: 1,359 Executed; 890 Convictions Overturned

Being sentenced to death by the courts in the United States does not mean a convicted individual is going to die at the hands of an executioner. Quite the contrary.

Federal statistics covering 40 years of the death penalty reveal that 8,466 people were sentenced to death from 1973 to 2013. But only 1,359 were executed during this time, according to Frank Baumgartner, the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Anna Dietrich, a UNC-CH graduate whose senior thesis was on this topic.

That translates into an execution rate of 16%.

A total of 3,194 had their sentences overturned on appeal, with 890 having their convictions thrown out. Another 1,781 had their death-penalty sentence overturned, but guilt was sustained. 523 got off death row because the law was declared unconstitutional.

The likelihood of carrying out a death sentence in an average state in the U.S. is 13%. Virginia is the only state to have executed more than 50% of the prison inmates it has sentenced to death.

"Those sentenced to death are almost 3 times as likely to see their death sentence overturned on appeal and to be resentenced to a lesser penalty than they are to be executed," Baumgartner and Dietrich wrote.

"Regardless of one's view of the death penalty in principle, these numbers raise questions about how the death penalty is applied in practice. The wide differences across states in the odds of carrying out a death sentence are potentially troubling from an equal protection standpoint," they added.

Source: allgov.com, March 20, 2015

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