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...record after another as trust between institutions evaporated, investors stashed so much cash in super-safe Treasuries that yields approached zero, and the private securitization market for mortgages, which keeps capital flowing for more home loans, disappeared. Lehman Brothers collapsed when no one would loan it money, and any number of other firms - AIG, Citigroup, GM - went hat in hand to the U.S. government, lender of last resort. (Read TIME's Top 10 Financial Collapses...
Anecdotal evidence of a bleak Christmas shopping season are starting to be confirmed by hard numbers. On Wednesday, the Commerce Department reported that consumer spending in November declined 0.6% from an already weak October. Disposable personal income, a gauge of how much money consumers have after the bills are paid, also declined in November, albeit a slight 0.1%. What's more, a hoped-for uptick in sales on the final weekend before Christmas does not appear to be materializing. Along with the sputtering economy, heavy winter weather across much of the nation played a big role in keeping people home...
...number of people sentenced to death has been falling nationally since a peak of about 300 a year in the 1990s, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, to 115 people in 2007. The reduction comes as more states, such as New York, New Jersey and Illinois have passed death penalty moratoriums; while some, like Maryland, are considering whether to abolish executions altogether...
...number of new residents appears to be slowing. "[In 2008] officials' zeal for executions was not matched by public desire for new death sentences, as evidenced by the continued steep decline in the number of new inmates arriving on death row," Houle says. Nowhere was that more apparent than in Houston, a city dubbed the "capital of capital punishment" in a study by the NAACP. After years of being a major contributor to Texas death row numbers, thanks in part to high profile "tough-on-crime" prosecutors, Houston juries sent no new prisoners to death row in 2008. The Harris...
...office have embraced the death penalty as an issue, but in recent elections, Houle notes, the issue has been rarely raised. Improved access to better quality defense counsel and the realization that capital cases usually cost county government upwards of $2 million each, Houle says, have helped reduce the number of death penalty cases. Recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions striking down the death penalty in certain kinds of cases - the rape of a child - and concerns about the legality of executing mentally retarded or mentally ill individuals have also slowed the number of capital cases being brought. With broader legal...