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August 12, 2024 
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Amid the relentless boil of the 24-hour news cycle, it can seem like everything's changing all the time, very fast — and often for the worse. But hidden amid the seemingly nonstop gloominess, there are bits of positive, slow-brewing progress, evolving over many years — though they're often hard to spot for all the commotion. Death penalty reform is one such hopeful story.
Long-term trends have favored abolition, owing in part to what the Death Penalty Information Center called "society's greater understanding about the fallibility of our legal system and its inability to protect innocent people from execution." Since the late 1990s, the number of states that have rejected capital punishment has increased steadily: 29 states now have either abolished the death penalty or paused executions by executive action, up from 12 in 1999.
Last year, for the first time, a Gallup poll found that more Americans believe the death penalty is administered unfairly than fairly (50 percent versus 47 percent). And the percentage of people who support the death penalty has fallen since the mid-1990s, dropping to 53 percent this year, the lowest level of support since 1972.
But a lot of work remains for abolitionists. A two-decade decline in executions — there were 11 in 2021, way down from the peak of 98 in 1999 — has recently reversed. There were 18 executions in 2022 and another 24 last year, a worrisome uptick driven in part by governors and prosecutors seeking to burnish their crime-fighting bona fides.
And there are still about 2,400 men and women languishing on death row around the United States.
Over the last three weeks, Opinion Video has published a trio of short films critical of the death penalty. Each is about a case involving someone who has been sentenced to death and is awaiting execution.
In one video, a former detective who played a critical role in the 2003 capital murder conviction of a man currently on Texas's death row explains why he now believes the defendant is innocent. In another, a Louisiana man appeals for mercy for his mother's killer, who is currently on Louisiana's death row. And the third, published today, is about how the conviction of another inmate in Texas largely hinged on a now discredited police investigative technique.
Together the videos present a portrait of capital punishment in America, one that offers many reasons to make it a thing of the past.
Watch the videos:
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'I Am So Sorry': Meeting the Man I Put on Death RowThe case that a former police detective regrets. By Brian Wharton, Kirk Semple and Adam Westbrook |
I Want to Free My Mother's Killer From Death RowWe're good at convicting and punishing people, but we need to learn how to forgive. By Brett Malone, Kirk Semple, Emily Holzknecht and Adam Westbrook |
The Science That Put This Man on Death Row Has Been Debunked. He's About to Be Executed Anyway.Charles Don Flores deserves a trial based on evidence, not on discredited science. By Kirk Semple and Adam Westbrook |
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