Riverside County Has Highest Death Penalty Rate In U.S.: Report

RIVERSIDE COUNTY, CA -- Riverside County is home to the highest death penalty rate in the country. A new report by the Death Penalty Information Center said the region is home to 8.5% of all new death sentences in the country since 2013.

Nearly one-third of the 39 new death sentences imposed in the United States in 2017 came from just three counties: Riverside, Clark County in Nevada and Maricopa County in Arizona. Riverside imposed five death sentences in 2017, Clark four, and Maricopa three, and no other county imposed as many as two, according to Death Penalty Information Center's annual report.

In other statistics, 76 percent of those sentenced to death in Riverside between 2010 and 2015 were defendants of color, and during that time frame it imposed death sentences at a rate that was 9 times greater per homicide than the rest of the state. All six defendants sentenced to death in Riverside in 2016 or 2017 were black or Latino, the group said.

That report found that the death penalty high-use counties tended to share "a history of overzealous prosecutions, inadequate defense lawyering, and a pattern of racial bias and exclusion," among other criminal justice issues, the Death Penalty Information Center said.

--Graphic courtesy of Death Penalty Information Center