This increase opens the door for mistakes to be made. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported a total of 3,219 prisoners awaiting execution as of December 1996, a 5 percent increase over the previous year (Rein et al. 67). The number of prisoners on death row has been increasing for more than fifteen years. Thirty-six of the thirty-eight states with capital punishment statutes provide automatic review of all capital sentences. While most of those states automatically review both the conviction and the sentence, Indiana, Idaho, Tennessee, Montana, and Oklahoma require only a review of the sentence. If an inmate in one of those states wanted a conviction reviewed, he or she would have to file an appeal or lose his or her right to do so. Catching error during review is an extensive process. The national average is 10.6 years from the time the sentence is imposed to the last inspection and execution (Liebman et al., par. 13). Many innocent death row prisoners have waited for years for the lengthy review procedures to uncover errors.
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