Death Penalty In the US: After Javier Righetti, How Many Inmates Are Awaiting Execution?

A man convicted of murdering a teenager nearly six years ago in Nevada was sentenced to death for his crimes on Tuesday, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. Javier Righetti admitted to the brutal killing that left Alyssa Otremba’s body to burn after he raped her in 2011.

With the jury’s verdict, Righetti , 24, became the youngest person ever to be sentenced to death and awaiting execution in the state of Nevada.

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Before his sentencing Tuesday, Righetti apologized to Otremba’s family during a brief statement.

“I look around and see how many people I’ve hurt and failed,” Righetti said. “I truly am sorry for this entire tragedy.”

Righetti will be joining an estimated 2,905 people on death row in the United States, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which described itself on its website as “ a national non-profit organization serving the media and the public with analysis and information on issues concerning capital punishment .”

Of the 31 states with the death penalty, Nevada had about 80 inmates awaiting capital punishment. That was enough to place it in 10^th place for number of inmates sentenced to death, while California had the most with more than 740.

Public support for the death penalty was fallen recently and hit a 40-plus years low last year when 49 percent of Americans said they were in favor of capital punishment, according to a Pew Research Center poll last year.

But that number apparently did not include President Donald Trump, who has been a vocal supporter of the death penalty since well before becoming a politician. While he called for the death penalty for WikiLeaks’ founder for the whistle-blowing website publishing of classified military documents in 2010, Trump made much bigger headlines in the late 1980s when he called for the capital punishment of five black and Hispanic young men convicted of raping a white woman in New York City.

At the time, Trump took out a full-page ad in the New York Times, worth tens of thousands of dollars, pleading to “Bring Back the Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!” over the case of the so-called “Central Park Five,” as the young men came to be known.

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Despite the fact that DNA cleared the young men of the crimes years later, Trump doubled down on his decades-old sentiments just last year when he was on the precipice of becoming the nation’s 45^th president.

“They admitted they were guilty,” Trump said in October while being interviewed on CNN. “The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous. And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same.”