The Washington Post reports that the nation's 1,600 execution tally is a data point that may not tell the whole story, said Robin M. Maher, the executive director of the nonpartisan Death Penalty Information Center. “The issue with executions is that they’re always a lagging indicator,” Maher said. “They measure past attitudes about the death penalty and decisions jurors made many years ago that are not reflective of what we’re seeing in public opinion today.”
Since 1976, considered the start of the “modern era” of the death penalty when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed most state executions to resume, the death penalty saw a quarter-century boom followed by another quarter-century of steady decline.
The death penalty peaked in 1999 with 279 death sentences and 98 executions, according to data tracked by the DPIC. By the end of 2023, there were 21 new death sentences and 24 executions. These days, the annual tally of executions are driven by just a handful of states, including Florida and Texas. In 35 states, the death penalty has either been abolished or not used in more than a decade.
To Maher and other researchers, the most telling data point that indicates the American public’s true feelings on the death penalty are the number of new death sentences, which has dropped sharply.
All five of this week’s executions also raised varying issues that have long concerned abolition advocates, including executions that were allowed to proceed despite strong claims of innocence and methods that might be unconstitutionally cruel and unusual:
Last Friday in South Carolina, Freddie Owens was executed only days after a key prosecution witness admitted to lying. On Tuesday, Travis Mullis was executed in Texas after giving up his appeals in what he referred to as “assisted suicide.” That same day, Marcellus Williams was executed in Missouri even though prosecutors from the office that convicted him admitted to errors in his case and joined the fight to free him from death row. Thursday morning, Oklahoma executed Emmanuel Littlejohn despite the state’s pardon and parole board recommending clemency.
Miller, convicted of murder in a 1999 workplace shooting spree, was executed Thursday evening in Alabama with a nitrogen gas method that has only been used once before. The Associated Press reported that Miller trembled on the gurney for about two minutes, followed by about six minutes of gasping breathing.
Problems with death penalty convictions and executions will ultimately be the death penalty’s undoing, say Jim and Nancy Petro, advisory board members of the National Registry of Exonerations and co-authors of the book “False Justice: Eight Myths that Convict the Innocent.”
Jim Petro, a Republican former Ohio state lawmaker and former state attorney general, who was initially a death-penalty supporter but then became involved in the case of Clarence Elkins, a man who was convicted of murder and rape but later exonerated with the help of DNA evidence. Elkins’ exoneration was eye-opening for Petro. “It made me realize the system wasn’t 100 percent perfect,” he said.
Death penalty experts say fear of wrongful convictions is one of the key reasons people do not support the death penalty. Since 1973, at least 200 people on death row have been exonerated, according to the DPIC. More than half of those exonerees are Black, a data point that critics say show that the death penalty is highly susceptible to racial bias.
Photo is of the electric chair in Auburn State Prison from 1908, from Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. The Library of Congress series “Chronicling America” series includes a chronology of the electric chair, which was adopted in the late 19th century as an alternative to hanging. But a few decades ago, the electric chair was increasingly deemed cruel and unusual punishment by states, which largely set it aside and moved to lethal injection.
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