For the fourth year in a row, juries around the country have delivered fewer death sentences:

In its year-end report, the Death Penalty Information Center projects approximately 138 death sentences for 2003, 20 below last year and less than half the number recorded annually during much of the 1990s.

"The public is more cautious about the death penalty, and that is showing," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the anti-capital punishment information clearinghouse. "The revelations of people who were wrongly convicted and now set free, cases of sloppy legal representation, crime labs that were not doing their job -- there were so many dimensions spreading doubt about what is happening here."

Texas, of course, is an anomaly. Of the 65 lethal injections last year, 24 were texecutions.

The Legislature rejected a proposal to add life without parole as a possible sentence in capital murder cases, an option for juries in 35 of the 38 death penalty states. Opponents argued it would result in fewer death sentences.

Only 11 states have carried out executions so far in 2003. The great majority of those -- 68 percent -- belonged to Texas, Oklahoma and North Carolina. All but a handful occurred in the South.

Still...four years in a row of declining death sentences is progress. More people are realizing the system is broken and deciding they don't want to be a part of it.