Twelve people in this archive were sentenced to death and died of illness or old age before the state got round to it. The penalty was never abolished in their jurisdictions. Nothing was commuted. They simply outlasted the process that was supposed to kill them.
Lawrence Bittaker was sentenced to death in California on 24 March 1981. He died of natural causes at San Quentin on 13 December 2019, aged seventy-nine, after thirty-eight years on death row. That is longer than most prison sentences of any kind, served under a sentence of death that was never carried out and never lifted.
Richard Ramirez was convicted on forty-three counts in September 1989 and sentenced to death that November. He died on 7 June 2013 of complications from B-cell lymphoma, with his appeals still running, twenty-four years on. William Bradford was condemned in 1987 and died at San Quentin in 2008, aged sixty-one. Robert Diaz was sentenced to death in April 1984 for killing twelve patients, maintained his innocence throughout, and died in prison in August 2010. Rodney Alcala was condemned in 1980, tried three times over three decades, condemned again in 2010, and died on death row in 2021.
Five of the twelve are Californian, which is not a coincidence. The state has the largest condemned population in the country and has carried out no execution since 2006.
Elsewhere the waits were shorter but the outcome identical. Howard Arthur Allen was sentenced to death in Indiana in June 1988 and died on death row in 2020. John Paul Phillips was condemned in Illinois in 1986 for one murder and died in 1993; he was never tried for two others, which Carbondale police closed against him in 2008 on DNA testing done fifteen years after his death. Daniel Siebert was sentenced to death in Alabama in March 1987 and died of pancreatic cancer in 2008. Gerald Patrick Lewis was condemned in Alabama in February 2000 and died in 2009. Derrick Todd Lee was sentenced to death in Louisiana in December 2004 and died of heart disease at Angola on 21 January 2016.
Two of the twelve differ in a way worth stating.
Joseph Edward Duncan was sentenced to death in federal court in August 2008 and died of brain cancer at the federal medical center in Terre Haute in 2021. The federal government resumed executions in 2020 after a seventeen-year pause and carried out thirteen in six months. Duncan was not among them, and died the following year.
Faye Copeland was sentenced to death in April 1991 at the age of sixty-nine, the oldest woman ever condemned in the United States. Her sentence was commuted to life in 1999 and she was granted medical parole, so she does not belong with the eleven who died still under sentence. She is here because her husband Ray, recorded in her entry rather than in one of his own, died of natural causes on death row in October 1993; the two of them were condemned together for the same killings.
What the twelve have in common with the twenty-one whose sentences lapsed when a jurisdiction abolished the penalty is that in none of the thirty-three cases did the state do what the court ordered. The difference is the mechanism. Those were spared by a change of law. These were spared by delay.
The delay is not incidental to how capital punishment now works in the United States. A death sentence in California is, in practice, a sentence of imprisonment until death from other causes, and has been for two decades. Bittaker's thirty-eight years are the clearest statement of that in this archive.
It also means the sentence recorded beside a name in any roster is a description of what a court decided, not of what happened to the person. Twelve of these entries say "sentenced to death". All twelve of these people died of something else.