Twenty-one people in this archive were sentenced to death and are not dead. None of them won an appeal. Nothing about their cases was reconsidered. The jurisdiction abolished capital punishment while they were sitting there, and the sentence lapsed with the penalty.
The largest single group comes from one American decision. In 1972 the Supreme Court struck down the capital statutes then in force in more than thirty states, and every man already condemned under them had his sentence converted. William Dale Archerd, condemned in California in 1968, became a life prisoner in 1972 and died in custody five years later. Charles Schmid, convicted of three murders in Tucson in 1966, was commuted in 1971. Posteal Laskey in Ohio, James Canaday in Washington, Thomas Creech in Idaho: all the same year, all the same reason, none of it to do with them.
Canaday's entry puts it plainly. The sentence was commuted not on the merits of his case but because of a decision taken in another state about a different defendant.
Kenneth McDuff is the case that shows what follows. Sentenced to death in Texas for the 1966 Broomstick Murders of three teenagers, commuted in 1972 with the rest, and then paroled in 1989 into an overcrowded prison system that needed the space. He killed again after his release. The chain that produced that runs through a constitutional ruling he had no part in.
Elsewhere the same thing happened one country at a time.
Turkey abolished capital punishment and Adnan Colak's six death sentences were commuted together. South Africa suspended executions in 1990 and abolished in 1995, which reached Casper Kruger. Ukraine abolished and Anatoly Onoprienko, sentenced to death in 1999 for the murders of fifty-two people, died in prison of natural causes in 2013. Canada had effectively stopped executing before it formally abolished in 1976, and Léopold Dion's sentence was commuted in the gap. Illinois abolished in 2011 and commuted every remaining death sentence, which took in Brian Dugan; New Jersey did the same in December 2007, which took in John Martini.
Russia is the strangest version, because nothing was ever abolished. It suspended executions in 1996 on joining the Council of Europe and formalised a moratorium in 1999, and has carried out none since. Vadim Yershov's sentence was commuted. Andrei Maslich's will have become life imprisonment in practice. Dmitry Voronenko said he would accept a death sentence, despite the moratorium, which is a thing you can only say when the state has quietly stopped doing it and not said so.
Two of these are worth separating out because the abolition arrived after the fact rather than in time.
Hilda Nilsson was sentenced to death in Sweden in 1917 and killed herself in her cell before the sentence could be considered. Her entry notes that it would in all likelihood have been commuted anyway: Sweden had carried out its last execution in 1910 and abolished capital punishment in 1921. She died under a penalty the country had already stopped using.
António Luís Costa is the opposite case. He is serving twenty-five years, which is the maximum sentence available in Portugal, because the country abolished life imprisonment in 1884 and has no provision for it. Nothing was commuted. The ceiling was simply lower than the crime, and had been for a century.
What the twenty-one have in common is that the most consequential thing that happened to them after conviction had nothing to do with them. Read alongside the four sets of brothers in this archive, who did comparable things and received sentences that were not comparable at all, the pattern is the same seen from a different angle. There, what varied was who could offer the state something. Here, it is when the calendar caught you.
A man condemned in Idaho in March 1976 is alive. A man condemned in Virginia in 1980 was electrocuted. Neither outcome was a judgement about the man.