Missouri's death row had nearly 100 inmates in the 1990s. Now, it has 8

ST. LOUIS (AP) — Missouri 's status as one of the most active death penalty states is about to change for one simple reason: The state is running out of inmates to execute.

The lethal injection of Christopher Collings on Dec. 3 left just eight men on death row — a figurative term since condemned Missouri inmates are housed with other prisoners. By contrast, nearly 100 people were living with a death sentence three decades ago.

Three of the eight Missouri inmates will almost certainly live out their lives in prison after being declared mentally incompetent for execution. Court appeals continue for the other five, and no new executions are scheduled.

Missouri isn’t alone. Across the nation, the number of people awaiting the ultimate punishment has declined sharply since the turn of the century.

“We are in a very, very different place than we were 25 years ago ,and that’s for very good reasons," said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that doesn't take a posi­tion on the death penal­ty but is crit­i­cal of prob­lems in its application.

The Legal Defense Fund’s Death Row USA report showed 2,180 people with pending death sentences this year, down from 3,682 in 2000. Missouri’s peak year was 1997, when 96 people were on death row.

After reaching a height of 98 U.S. executions in 1999, the annual number hasn’t topped 30 since 2014. So far this year, 23 executions have been carried out — six in Alabama, five in Texas, four in Missouri, three in Oklahoma, two in South Carolina and one each in Georgia, Utah and Florida. Two more are scheduled: Wednesday in Indiana and Thursday in Oklahoma.

Use of the death penalty has declined in part because many states have turned away from it. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia have abolished the punishment, and five others have moratoriums.

Even in active death penalty states, prosecutors in murder cases are far more inclined to seek life in prison without parole.

In the 1990s, the nation was typically seeing over 300 new death sentences each year. By contrast, 21 people were sentenced to death nationwide in 2023.

A major factor is the cost. At trial, additional experts are often brought in, cases tend to run longer, and a separate hearing is required in the penalty phase, Maher said.

Costs don't end with the prosecution. Court appeals often drag on for decades, running up huge legal bills incurred by public entities — prosecutors, attorneys general, public defenders. Sixteen of this year's 23 executions involved inmates incarcerated 20 years or more.

“Millions and millions of dollars are being used — those are taxpayer dollars — for a system that by and large the American public has concluded is not keeping them safer,” Maher said.

Court rulings have resulted in fewer death sentences, too, including Supreme Court decisions barring execution of the mentally disabled and those who were minors at the time of their crimes, Maher said.

Views of capital punishment also have changed. A Gallup poll last year found 50% of Americans believed capital punishment was applied unfairly, compared to 47% who believed it was fairly implemented. This was the highest such number since Gallup first began asking about the fairness of the death penalty’s application in 2000.

Still, there are indications of new support for the death penalty in some places.

Two executions in South Carolina were the first in that state since 2011. Utah carried out its first execution in 14 years. Idaho tried to execute Thomas Eugene Creech in February — the state's first since 2012 — but corrections department workers couldn't find a viable vein to deliver the lethal drug. The execution in Indiana this week would be the first in 15 years.

Meanwhile, incoming President Donald Trump, who restarted federal executions, with 13 carried out in his first term, has suggested he'll use the death penalty again.

“If President Trump and other elected officials are paying attention to what public support is telling them, they will be more reluctant to use the death penalty going forward,” Maher said.

Some of the most aggressive prosecutors pursuing the death penalty are in California, even though Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom placed a moratorium on its use.

San Bernardino County District Attorney Jason Anderson's office has successfully prosecuted four death penalty cases since he took office six years ago, including one last week: Jerome Rogers was sentenced to death for robbing and killing two elderly women.

Anderson said some crimes are so heinous that the death penalty “is appropriate to pursue."

“When you sit in a courtroom and you see the anguish of the victim’s surviving family members, they certainly aren’t concerned about their tax dollars going to pursue what we think is a different level of evil in a death penalty case,” Anderson said.

He noted that the four death penalty cases he prosecuted involved the killings of a combined 12 victims.

“How do you put a price tag on 12 dead people?” Anderson asked.

FILE - This photo provided by the Missouri Department of Corrections shows Marcellus Williams. (Missouri Department of Corrections via AP, file)

FILE - This undated photo provided by the Missouri Department of Corrections shows Christopher Collings. (Missouri Department of Corrections via AP, File)

FILE - Joseph Amrine, who was exonerated two decades ago after spending years on death row, speaks at a rally to support Missouri death row inmate Marcellus Williams in Clayton, Mo., on Aug. 21, 2024.(AP Photo/Jim Salter, File)

NEW YORK (AP) — Former talk show host Carlos Watson was sentenced Monday to nearly 10 years in prison in a federal financial conspiracy case that cast his once-buzzy Ozy Media as an extreme of fake-it-'til-you-make-it startup culture.

In one example, another Ozy executive impersonated a YouTube executive to hype Ozy to investment bankers — while Watson coached him, prosecutors said.

Watson, 55, and the now-defunct company were found guilty last summer of charges including wire fraud conspiracy. He has denied the allegations and plans to appeal.

“I loved what we built with Ozy,” he said in court Monday, initially addressing supporters in the audience before the judge suggested he turn around. Watson told the judge he was a target of “selective prosecution” as a Black entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, where African American executives have been disproportionately few, and he called the case “a modern lynching.”

“I made mistakes. I'm very, very sorry that people are hurt, myself included,” he said, but “I don't think it's fair.”

Watson, who faced a mandatory minimum sentence of two years in prison and potentially as much as 37 years, remains free for now on $3 million bond. He is to surrender to prison March 28. Any restitution will be determined after a hearing in February.

U.S. District Judge Eric Komitee said Monday that the “quantum of dishonesty in this case is exceptional.”

“Your internal apparatus for separating truth from fiction became badly miscalibrated,” he told Watson in sentencing him.

Prosecutors accused the former cable news commentator and host of playing a leading role in a scheme to deceive Ozy investors and lenders by inflating revenue numbers, touting deals and offers that were nonexistent or not finalized, and flashing other false indications of Ozy's success.

Watson even listened in and texted talking points while his co-founder posed as a YouTube executive to praise Ozy on a phone call with potential investors, prosecutors said.

“His incessant and deliberate lies demonstrated not only a brazen disregard for the rule of law, but also a contempt for the values of honesty and fairness that should underlie American entrepreneurship,” Brooklyn-based U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said in a statement Monday. His office prosecuted the case.

During the trial, Watson's defense blamed any misrepresentations on others, particularly co-founder Samir Rao and former Ozy chief of staff Suzee Han. She and Rao pleaded guilty, are awaiting sentencing and testified against Watson.

Watson portrayed himself Monday as a founder who put everything he had into his company, saying that he took an average salary of around $51,000 from Ozy in its final years, has triple-mortgaged his home and drives a 15-year-old car.

After court, he questioned why Brooklyn-based federal prosecutors had gone after a California-based company and founder. Prosecutors declined to comment; the indictment alleged that scheming happened in the Brooklyn-based jurisdiction and elsewhere.

“I do think this is an attack on Black excellence,” Watson said after noting that his sentence wasn't far from the 11-year term meted out to Elizabeth Holmes. She's the white former Silicon Valley CEO convicted of duping investors in the Theranos blood-testing device hoax.

There's no parallel between faking blood test results and Ozy's roster of real programs and events, Watson said.

Ozy, founded in 2012, was styled as a hub of news and culture for millennials with a global outlook.

Watson boasted an impressive resume: degrees from Harvard University and Stanford Law School, a stint on Wall Street, on-air gigs at CNN and MSNBC, and entrepreneurial chops. Ozy Media was his second startup, coming a decade after he sold a test-prep company that he had founded while in his 20s.

Mountain View, California-based Ozy produced TV shows, newsletters, podcasts, and a music-and-ideas festival. Watson hosted several of the TV programs, including the Emmy-winning “Black Women OWN the Conversation,” which appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Network.

Ozy snagged big advertisers, clients and grants. But beneath the outward signs of success was an overextended company that struggled — and dissembled — to stay afloat after 2017, according to insiders' testimony.

The company strained to make payroll, ran late on rent and took out pricey cash advances to pay bills, former finance vice president Janeen Poutre told jurors. Meanwhile, Ozy gave prospective investors much bigger revenue numbers than those it reported to accountants, according to testimony and documents.

On the witness stand in July, Watson said the company's cash squeezes were just a startup norm and its investors knew they were getting unaudited numbers that could change.

Only one of those investors spoke at the sentencing — Beverly Watson, who stands by her brother. She told the court Monday that her biggest loss was “this important platform that elevated people and ideas that weren't being heard before.”

Ozy disintegrated in 2021, after a New York Times column disclosed the phone-call impersonation gambit and raised questions about the true size of the startup's audience.

FILE - Carlos Watson leaves Brooklyn federal court after testifying in his own defense in New York, Monday, July 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Stefan Jeremiah, File)