Is capital punishment in the United States on the way out?
By Chris Conway Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
The United States is an outlier on the death penalty. Its neighbors to the north and south, Canada and Mexico, have struck capital punishment from their laws. So too has every Western European nation, Australia and numerous countries in South America and Africa. |
In the United States, the federal government retains the death penalty for certain offenses. Thirteen federal prisoners were executed while former President Donald Trump was in office, the most under any president in more than 120 years. On the state level, 24 states have the death penalty and 23 have abolished it, including nine since 2009, and another three have imposed moratoriums in recent years, including California, with nearly 700 on death row, and Pennsylvania, with 105. |
Not only are states stepping away from laws authorizing the death penalty, but death sentences and executions are in decline, even as the country appears nearly evenly split on capital punishment, according to Gallup public opinion surveys. |
It is these trends that Maurice Chammah points to in a guest essay to make his argument that capital punishment in the United States is on its way out. Chammah has reported extensively about capital punishment for the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the criminal justice system, and wrote a book about the issue, "Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty." |
From this vantage, he argues that as the Supreme Court has largely left the question to the states, a "growing number" of state lawmakers "on the right are teaming up with civil rights groups and Democrats" to limit or abolish capital punishment. |
So it's not only a phenomenon on the left. |
"Last year," Chammah writes, "I discovered in my reporting that in at least half the states with an active death penalty, Republican lawmakers had recently sponsored or written bills to ban or constrain the punishment." |
Some of this may have to do with the enormous cost of prosecuting death penalty cases against determined defense lawyers. Some of it may have to do with the exonerations of death row prisoners after evidence was re-examined or new facts were brought forward. And some of it may have to do with the moral questions surrounding execution. |
Chammah believes these forces are eroding support for capital punishment in statehouses and among the public. But he adds that it will be a very slow process before the last person is put to death by the federal or state governments. |
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