Examining some statistical realities behind federal death penalty administration

This intriguing Voactiv piece, headlined "Here Are The Odds The Boston Bomber Will Get The Death Penalty," draws on the Boston bomber federal capital trial as an opportunity to looks at some basic federal capital sentencing data. The piece is subheaded "Turns out, it's pretty hard to get a jury to vote for execution," and here are excerpts:

As the [Tsarnaev] trial wraps up its first week, we looked at how often the U.S. Attorney General has asked for the death penalty over the past two decades, and how often it has been able to get the jury to agree.  Between 1989 and 2009, some 2,795 cases were eligible for the death penalty.  Of those, the federal government brought 262 death- cases to trial and only 70, or about 25 percent, ended in a death sentence, according to the most recent statistics from the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel.  In the vast majority of the 262 cases, the juries recommended a life sentence instead.

Many death-penalty cases, another 201, never saw the inside a courtroom because they were settled before the trial....  [And] the federal government rarely pursues it even in cases that are eligible.  The U.S. Attorney General has approved death penalty prosecution for only 15 percent of all eligible cases over the past 20 years....

Even if Tsarnaev does get the death penalty, the execution isn’t likely to happen any time soon: Of the 70 people who have been sentenced to death in federal trials around the country in the last two decades, most are still waiting on death row.  Only three people have been executed since 1977, the latest in 2001.  Some defendants have been waiting on death row for over 20 years.