The painfully slow death of the death penalty in the United States continued to play itself out in 2015, reducing the ultimate punishment to levels not seen for the past 40 years, according to two new reports.
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“The use of the death penalty is becoming increasingly rare and increasingly isolated in the United States”, said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
This year, 28 executions have been performed, down from a 1999 peak of 98. Forty-nine new death sentences were imposed, down 33 percent from 2014, and executions took place six states, the lowest number since 1988. It’s an 84 percent drop since 1996, when the number of death-penalty sentences reached its high of 315 nationwide. It has carried out 13 this year – nearly half the total for the country – followed by Missouri which continues its newfound passion for killing people with six executions, followed by Georgia with five.
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A new report from CDPL, On Trial for Their Lives: The Hidden Costs of Wrongful Capital Prosecutions in North Carolina, documented 56 cases since 1989 in which the state sought the death penalty against defendants, despite evidence too weak to prove their guilt.
About 61 % of Americans support the death penalty in homicide cases, in accordance to a Gallup poll in October, still in that share has inched downward while opposition has crept up.
The Texas group said in an annual summary that 2015 also is the first year since 1976 that jurors in the three most populous counties – Harris, Dallas and Tarrant – sent no new inmates to death row.
A lethal injection drug shortage persisted into 2015 resulting in several states, including OH and Nebraska, halting executions for the foreseeable future.
In June, the Supreme Court upheld the lethal injection process used in Oklahoma. Death penalty opponents are hoping the high courtroom eventually will abolish the penalty as cruel and weird under the Constitution.
On the other hand, there are states with the death penalty on the books that rarely use it anymore.
In November, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice reported 252 inmates on death row, the lowest number since 1987, according to the coalition’s report. Another factor within the current decline is improved legal illustration for defendants. Since 1973, 156 inmates have been exonerated and freed from death row.
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The decline reflects lower murder rates and the effect of recent changes in sentencing laws that have given juries the life-without-parole option in capital cases. Three death row inmates had challenged the use of the sedative midazolam, which is routinely injected into prisoners being put to death in order to first knock them out, so that they can not feel excruciating pain when the other two drugs enter their bloodstream. Georgia, Texas and Virginia have all created statewide capital-case defender programs staffed by attorneys who specialize in those cases. “People have become a lot more aware of some of the critical problems that persistently affect capital cases”, he said.
