Under Pa. death penalty, why so few executions?

Ten years ago, Gary Heidnik had two slices of cheese pizza and a couple of cups of black coffee, met with his daughter, and spent the rest of the day on his bed or pacing his cell. That night, he was given a lethal injection for imprisoning, torturing, and murdering two women in the basement of his Philadelphia home.

In the decade since, Pennsylvania has executed no one. Its death row is the fourth-largest in the nation, yet the 218 men and five women are far more likely to die of natural causes than from lethal injection.

Since the commonwealth reinstated the death penalty in 1978, three inmates have been executed; all had dropped their appeals. At least seven times that number have passed away, most of natural causes such as cancer or heart failure, while awaiting execution, according to an informal Corrections Department tally.

To find a Pennsylvania inmate unwillingly put to death, you have to go back almost half a century to the last use of the electric chair.

"I think it is indicative of a split - people want the death penalty, but don't want a lot of executions," said Richard Dieter of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center.

It wasn't always so in Pennsylvania. The commonwealth has recorded more than a thousand executions in its history, starting with public hangings in the time of the early colonists. Hundreds were put to death in the electric chair during the first half of the 20th century.

Supporters of the death penalty attribute the recent dearth to resistance in the courts, while opponents point to errors in past cases discovered during the close scrutiny of the appeals process.

Defense attorneys say there is good reason for the modern reluctance, given recent high-profile exonerations of death-row inmates. Last year, Nicholas Yarris, freed from Pennsylvania's death row in 2004 after 23 years behind bars on murder and rape convictions, reached a multimillion-dollar settlement with Delaware County, where he had been prosecuted.

"When you look at some of the people who have been exonerated, it's quite a frightening thing to know that we could have been executing an innocent person," said Charles Cunningham of the Defender Association of Philadelphia. "It's bad enough to put an innocent person in jail, but to take that person's life, it's horrifying."

A 2007 American Bar Association assessment noted such cases and chided the commonwealth for not taking steps to make erroneous convictions less likely, such as ordering preservation of biological evidence and recording interrogations. A state Supreme Court committee in 2003 called for a moratorium, saying minorities make up two-thirds of the inmates on death row.

New Jersey in 2007 became the first state in four decades to abolish the death penalty, and New Mexico followed suit this year. Others are considering doing the same, citing not only concerns about possible execution of the innocent or bias in application, but also concerns about the cost of the system.

Prosecutors defend the use of capital punishment, and state lawmakers have shown no inclination to end it.

"It would be ironic to repeal the death penalty, if the people believe it's an appropriate punishment in a very small number of cases, merely because opponents of the death penalty have tried to frustrate its operation," Philadelphia Assistant District Attorney Ronald Eisenberg said.

Thirty-five states allow the death penalty, but only nine or 10 in a typical year have executions; of the 37 last year, most were in the South - and most of those occurred in Texas.

California has the nation's largest death row with 678 inmates, but has had only 13 executions since 1978.

Since Heidnik's death, Pennsylvania has come close to executions a few times.

In 2000, Daniel Saranchak was to be executed for the 1993 shooting deaths of his grandmother and uncle in Schuylkill County, but a federal judge ordered a new trial, citing an ineffective lawyer. And George Banks was to be put to death in 2004 for the 1982 massacre of 13 people in Wilkes-Barre, but a state judge said he was too mentally ill.

On July 6, 10 years to the day after Heidnik's execution, Gov. Rendell signed the death warrant of an Altoona man who petitioned the governor to do so.

Walter Wright III was convicted of killing the husband of a woman he had dated briefly after bursting into their home early Thanksgiving morning in 1998.

Wright, who has maintained his innocence, is scheduled for execution Sept. 3. Federal public defenders, though, immediately jumped in with a request to halt the proceedings while they mapped out an appeal on constitutional issues.