Capital punishment is falling out of favor
In May, New Hampshire became the 21st state to abolish the death penalty, when lawmakers overrode a veto by Gov. Chris Sununu.
After that, Robert Dunham started to see the map in a whole new way.
Dunham, who leads the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, saw the death penalty had disappeared not only from New England but largely from the MidAtlantic to Appalachia.
“I MapQuested this,” Dunham said ahead of the center’s recent release of its new report. “If you started your car in Madawaska, Maine, and you drove it to Fort Gay, W.V., you would go 1,289 miles without setting a tire in a death penalty state.”
Nationwide, there were fewer than 30 executions and 50 death sentences for the fifth year in a row. Public support for the death penalty remains near a 47-year low.
Twenty-two people were executed this year in a handful of states: Texas, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, South Dakota and Tennessee.
The 33 death sentences (issued as of mid-December) came from just 28 counties, the resport says. That’s less than 1 percent of all counties in the country.
“That’s a 75 percent drop in executions from their peak at the end of the 1990s and an 85 percent drop in death sentences since their peak in the mid-’90s,” Dunham said.
As downward trends held steady, there also were exceptional developments in how states administered capital punishment.
In addition to New Hampshire’s abolition, California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a moratorium on executions in May. The state holds a quarter of all death row prisoners in the United States.
“California has by far the largest death row in the country, so the moratorium means a huge effective decline in America’s death row,” Brandon Garrett, a Duke law professor who has written several books on the death penalty and prosecution, said in an email. “Over time, more states that are not executing anyone may reconsider the … death penalty as not a worthwhile use of resources.”
Earlier this year, Oregon vastly curtailed instances when the death penalty could be imposed. As of mid-December, Indiana marked a full decade with no executions.
The Trump administration’s effort to revive federal executions places it increasingly out of touch with the majority of Americans.
According to the latest Gallup Poll, a record 60 percent of Americans favor life without parole over execution.
In two of the most high-profile Supreme Court cases of the year, criticism of state misconduct was dragged into full view. The cases of Rodney Reed in Texas and Curtis Flowers in Mississippi were extraordinary and sensational, Dunham said.
Flowers has been tried six times in the same killings, a case that was thrust into the national spotlight by the American Public Media podcast “In the Dark.”
His latest conviction in a 1996 quadruple killing in a Mississippi furniture store came under review by the Supreme Court, which overturned the guilty finding in the summer as it ruled a white prosecutor worked to keep blacks off the jury.
Reed’s case attracted the attention of a wide range of high-profile figures, including Sen. Ted Cruz, RTexas, Kim Kardashian West and Oprah Winfrey. Reed received a rare last-minute stay of execution as supporters called for DNA evidence that could exonerate him to be tested.
Reed, who’s black, is accused of raping and murdering Stacey Stites, 19, a white woman who was engaged to a police officer. Reed maintained the two were having a consensual affair and that Stites’ fiance murdered her out of anger over her affair.
“Americans now know that innocent people are at risk of being executed. For years, death penalty proponents denied that. But with 166 exonerations, only the most ardent innocence denier claims there is no risk of executing the innocent,” Dunham said. “I think cases like this just add to the perception that the government cannot be trusted to be fair in these cases.”
“African-Americans have known this all along,” he added. “The question is whether events like this will make a dent in the psyche of white Americans.”