The U.S. stands as one of the last Western powers to actively execute its citizens. Despite the fact that more than two-thirds of all nations have abolished the practice by law or through practice, despite the fact that the death penalty has not been proven to be an effective deterrent against crime, and despite a clear bias on socioeconomic and racial lines against those that are sentenced to death in the U.S., the nation continues to stubbornly hold on to the notion of life forfeiture as punishment for the most severe of crimes.
However, this attitude may be changing. According to Gallup, the number of Americans that feel that the death penalty is a fitting punishment for convicted murderers has dropped to its lowest level in more than 40 years. Sixty percent of Americans now say that they favor the death penalty for convicted murderers, compared to 35 percent who indicated that they are opposed. This is the lowest level of approval recorded by the Gallup Organization since November 1972, where 57 percent were in favor. The current polling is a 20 point drop from the high of 80 percent, recorded in 1994.
“Americans have typically favored the death penalty; in fact, support has exceeded opposition in all but one survey, conducted in May 1966, during an era marked by philosophical and legal challenges to the death penalty from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s,” read Gallup’s poll summary.
“Americans’ support for the death penalty waned during that time. The culmination of that era was the Supreme Court’s 1972 Furman v. Georgia decision, which invalidated all state death penalty statutes on technical grounds but stopped short of declaring the practice itself unconstitutional. Four years later, the court ruled that several newly written death penalty laws were constitutional, and executions resumed in the U.S. shortly thereafter.”
“From then until the mid-’90s, death penalty support climbed, reaching 80% in 1994, a year in which Americans consistently named crime as the most important problem facing the U.S.. The current era of lower support may be tied to death penalty moratoriums in several states beginning around 2000 after several death-row inmates were later proven innocent of the crimes of which they were convicted. More recently, since 2006, six states have repealed death penalty laws outright, including Maryland this year.”
81 percent of Republicans support the death penalty, compared to 47 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of Independents. Only 52 percent of all Americans feel that the death penalty is applied fairly, while 42 percent feel that the death penalty is not applied often enough in this country.
Currently, 35 states, the federal government and the Armed Forces currently have active death penalty statutes on their books. As of 2012, only 21 nations are known — according to Amnesty International — to have executed a prisoner between 2011 and 2012: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Belarus, China, Gambia, India, Iran, Iraq, Japan, North Korea, Pakistan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Taiwan, United Arab Emirates, U.S. and Yemen.
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No big movement in decades
In 1972, the death penalty in the U.S. was temporarily suspended after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling of Furman v. Georgia. In this decision, the court ruled that all standing death sentences were unconstitutional through their violation of the 8th Amendment, which offers protections against cruel and punishments. But the ruling failed to recognize the practice of the death penalty as unconstitutional per se. At the heart of the case was the question of an “unitary trial,” in which a jury is asked to both weigh the guilt of a defendant and determine his sentence simultaneously, in violation of the “innocent until proven guilty” doctrine.
Thirty-seven states reauthorized the death sentence — this time in compliance with Furman v. Georgia. Some made the death sentence the mandatory punishment for certain classes of murder and others adopted “bifurcated trials,” in which the guilt-innocence phase and the sentencing phase of a case are separated and typically heard by different juries. In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that “bifurcated trials” must be used in all capital trials, that the death penalty cannot be used as a mandatory sentence and life forfeiture is reserved for first-degree murder, kidnapping resulting in death and crimes against the state cases.
Since 1976, two major restrictions to the execution of death penalties were imposed — Atkins v. Virginia in 2002, which ruled that the execution of anyone with an IQ of below 70 constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment,” and Roper v. Simmons in 2005, which outlaws the death penalty for anyone under the age of 18 at the time the crime was committed — and six states dropped their post-1976 death penalty statutes.
Debate over a shrinking practice
Many feel that the U.S.’ continued use of the death penalty is both unfair and inhumane, due to the nature of racial and socioeconomic bias in American jurisprudence. According to Amnesty International, almost all death row inmates were denied an attorney of their own choosing because of an inability to pay for one. Public defenders tend to be overworked and underpaid — making them less effective than private lawyers. As a result, typically — based on the quality of the defendant’s defense and the discretion of the local prosecutor, different defendants charged with the same crime tend to get different sentences. 82 percent of all post-1976 executions occurred in the South; the Northeast is accountable for less than one percent of the national tally.
Amnesty International holds that, post-1976, 77 percent of all death row cases involved defendants charged with killing a white defendant. African Americans make up roughly half of all homicide victims. Considering that the death sentence is being used in deference to local politics and at the advantage to the poor and disenfranchised, the argument toward continuing the death penalty is increasingly becoming an emotional one particularly, in light of the fact that the number of executions being conducted — just 43 in 2012 — are shrinking.
“Consider the twenty-seven states where at least one execution occurred during the sample period [1977 to 1996]. Executions deter murder in only six states,” explained Joanna Shepherd in her paper “Deterrence Versus Brutalization: Capital Punishment’s Differing Impacts Among States.”
“Capital punishment, however, actually increases murder in thirteen states, more than twice as many as experience deterrence. In eight states, capital punishment has no effect on the murder rate. That is, executions have a deterrent effect in only twenty-two percent of states. In contrast, executions induce additional murders in forty-eight percent of states. In seventy-eight percent of states, executions do not deter murder.”
“If deterrence is capital punishment’s purpose, as is often stated by our president and others, then, in the majority of states where executions do not deter crime, executions kill convicts uselessly. Moreover, in the many states where the brutalization effect outweighs the deterrent effect, executions not only kill convicts needlessly but also induce the additional murders of many innocent people […] Thus, in the many states that execute without a deterrent effect, policymakers should consider abandoning the death penalty. These states’ executions do not deter crime. If deterrence is the goal, capital punishment in these states simply does not work. Instead, it needlessly kills both convicts and innocents. Of course, if policymakers in the no-deterrence states have goals other than deterrence, such as retribution, then they might continue capital punishment, despite the absence of deterrence.,” Shepherd continued.
“In the many states, however, where executions not only fail to deter but also cause additional murders of innocent people, policymakers might think twice before permitting state sponsored revenge that, in effect, kills innocent bystanders.”
The Innocence Project is a national litigation group that offers DNA testing to help exonerate the falsely accused. To date, there have been 311 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the U.S.. According to the Innocence Project. roughly 70 percent of those exonerated were of color. Florida, Texas, California and Georgia constitute the prison systems where most of the DNA exonerations took place.
“The common themes that run through these cases — from global problems like poverty and racial issues to criminal justice issues like eyewitness misidentification, invalid or improper forensic science, overzealous police and prosecutors and inept defense counsel — cannot be ignored and continue to plague our criminal justice system.,“ stated the Innocence Project.
For a system that has proven to be more expensive than traditional incarceration, more prone to abuse and prosecutorial misconduct, and is generally panned internationally, the U.S. may be well-served in reconsidering its attachment to the death sentence. “I cannot support a system which, in its administration, has proven so fraught with error and has come so close to the ultimate nightmare, the state’s taking of innocent life … Until I can be sure that everyone sentenced to death in Illinois is truly guilty, until I can be sure with moral certainty that no innocent man or woman is facing a lethal injection, no one will meet that fate,” remarked then-Governor George Ryan, R – Ill., on his decision to declare a moratorium on executions in Illinois in 2000.