Why enforce the death penalty

New death sentences have also declined sharply: 31 people were sentenced to death in , far below the more than who received death sentences each year between and In recent years, prosecutors in some U. For both Black and White Americans, these figures include those who identify as Hispanic.

Annual executions are far below their peak level. Nationally, 17 people were put to death in , the fewest since and far below the modern peak of 98 in , according to BJS and the Death Penalty Information Center. The COVID outbreak disrupted legal proceedings in much of the country in , causing some executions to be postponed. Even as the overall number of executions in the U. The Trump administration executed 10 prisoners in and another three in January ; prior to , the federal government had carried out a total of three executions since The Biden administration has taken a different approach from its predecessor.

In July , Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered a halt in federal executions while the Justice Department reviews its policies and procedures.

The average time between sentencing and execution in the U. In , the average time between sentencing and execution was 74 months, or a little over six years, according to BJS.

By , that figure had more than tripled to months, or 22 years. The average prisoner awaiting execution at the end of , meanwhile, had spent nearly 19 years on death row. A variety of factors explain the increase in time spent on death row, including lengthy legal appeals by those sentenced to death and challenges to the way states and the federal government carry out executions, including the drugs used in lethal injections.

Fresh data delivered Saturday mornings. It organizes the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values. EJI provides legal assistance to people on death row, many of whom are innocent or wrongly convicted.

We provide representation at trial, on appeal, and in postconviction proceedings to people facing execution. We have documented widespread racial bias in the administration of the death penalty and we challenge racial discrimination in jury selection, sentencing, and throughout the system. We protect vulnerable people facing execution, including people with mental illness who are uniquely at risk, and we produce reports about capital punishment and the ways in which public safety can be undermined by relying on this expensive and flawed punishment.

For every nine people executed, one person on death row has been exonerated. The same factors drive wrongful convictions in non-capital cases and death penalty cases, including:. A record exonerations in involved witnesses who lied on the stand or falsely accused the defendant. In 50 of these cases, the defendant was falsely accused of a crime that never happened.

Official misconduct is more common in death penalty cases, especially if the defendant is Black. The intense pressure to obtain a death sentence and the political stakes for police, prosecutors, and even judges can cause serious legal errors that contribute to wrongful convictions and death sentences.

In Alabama alone, over death sentences have been invalidated by state and federal courts, resulting in conviction of a lesser offense or a lesser sentence on retrial. Inadequate legal assistance, racial bias, and prosecutorial indifference to innocence make Mr. The failure to provide adequate counsel to capital defendants and people sentenced to death is a defining feature of the American death penalty.

Whether a defendant will be sentenced to death typically depends on the quality of his legal team more than any other factor. Some lawyers provide outstanding representation to capital defendants. But few defendants facing capital charges can afford to hire an attorney, so they are appointed lawyers who are frequently overworked, underpaid, and inexperienced in trying death penalty cases.

Capital cases are especially complex, time-intensive, and financially draining. Lawyers representing indigent capital defendants often face enormous caseloads, caps on fees, and a critical lack of resources for investigation and expert assistance.

Too often they fail to adequately investigate cases, call witnesses, and challenge forensic evidence. Capital defense l awyers have slept through parts of trial, shown up in court intoxicated, or done no work to prepare for sentencing. Inadequate defense lawyers contribute to wrongful convictions and death sentences, and by failing to object at trial, they make it harder to correct errors on appeal. That leaves people sentenced to death with little hope for relief in postconviction proceedings, where they have to present new evidence and navigate complicated procedural rules.

By , court-ordered executions outpaced lynchings for the first time. Two-thirds of people executed in the s were Black, and the trend continued. Georgia , U. Latest press releases, statements and briefing notes. Bachelet condemns execution of child offenders in Iran.

UN expert urges efforts from France for the return of 7 nationals awaiting execution in Iraq. Civil society organizations pave the road to end capital punishment in Chad 9 October Death penalty and transparency — what's to hide? More stories In this section. The chamber is sealed, and cyanide is dropped into the acid to form a lethal gas. Execution by suffocation in the lethal gas chamber has not been abolished but lethal injection serves as the primary method in states which still authorize it.

In a panel of judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California where the gas chamber has been used since ruled that this method is a "cruel and unusual punishment. A few seconds later he again looked in my direction. His face was red and contorted as if he were attempting to fight through tremendous pain. His mouth was pursed shut and his jaw was clenched tight.

Don then took several more quick gulps of the fumes. His face and body turned a deep red and the veins in his temple and neck began to bulge until I thought they might explode. After about a minute Don's face leaned partially forward, but he was still conscious. Every few seconds he continued to gulp in. He was shuddering uncontrollably and his body was racked with spasms. His head continued to snap back. His hands were clenched.

At this time the muscles along Don's left arm and back began twitching in a wavelike motion under his skin. Spittle drooled from his mouth. Approximately two minutes later, we were told by a prison official that the execution was complete. District Court , S.

The latest mode of inflicting the death penalty, enacted into law by more than 30 states, is lethal injection , first used in in Texas. It is easy to overstate the humaneness and efficacy of this method; one cannot know whether lethal injection is really painless and there is evidence that it is not.

As the U. Court of Appeals observed, there is "substantial and uncontroverted evidence… that execution by lethal injection poses a serious risk of cruel, protracted death…. Even a slight error in dosage or administration can leave a prisoner conscious but paralyzed while dying, a sentient witness of his or her own asphyxiation.

Heckler , F. Its veneer of decency and subtle analogy with life-saving medical practice no doubt makes killing by lethal injection more acceptable to the public.

Journalist Susan Blaustein, reacting to having witnessed an execution in Texas, comments:. Nor does execution by lethal injection always proceed smoothly as planned. In "the authorities repeatedly jabbed needles into … Stephen Morin, when they had trouble finding a usable vein because he had been a drug abuser. Although the U. Supreme Court has held that the current method of lethal injection used is constitutional, several people have suffered because of this form of execution.

In Ohio, Rommel Broom was subjected to 18 attempts at finding a vein so that he could be killed by lethal injection. The process to try to execute him took over two hours. Finally, the governor had to stop the execution and grant the inmate a one week reprieve. Nor was he the only Ohio inmate so maltreated.

The state had amended its injection protocol to use a single drug, propofol, which advocates say causes severe pain upon injection. Although similar suits are pending in other states, [15] not all protocol-based challenges have succeeded; in Texas and Oklahoma, executions have continued despite questions about the potential cruelty of lethal injection and the type or number of chemicals used.

Food and Drug Administration FDA —are now the subject of federal litigation that could impact the legitimacy of the American death penalty system. Most people who have observed an execution are horrified and disgusted. In my face he could see the horror of his own death.

Revulsion at the duty to supervise and witness executions is one reason why so many prison wardens — however unsentimental they are about crime and criminals — are opponents of capital punishment. Don Cabana, who supervised several executions in Missouri and Mississippi reflects on his mood just prior to witnessing an execution in the gas chamber:.

It has been said that men on death row are inhuman, cold-blooded killers. But as I stood and watched a grieving mother leave her son for the last time, I questioned how the sordid business of executions was supposed to be the great equalizer…. The 'last mile' seemed an eternity, every step a painful reminder of what waited at the end of the walk. Where was the cold-blooded murderer, I wondered, as we approached the door to the last-night cell.

I had looked for that man before… and I still had not found him — I saw, in my grasp, only a frightened child. I don't want to do this anymore. They do their best to perform the impossible and inhumane job with which the state has charged them. Those of us who have participated in executions often suffer something very much like posttraumatic stress.

Many turn to alcohol and drugs. For some individuals, however, executions seem to appeal to strange, aberrant impulses and provide an outlet for sadistic urges. Warden Lewis Lawes of Sing Sing Prison in New York wrote of the many requests he received to watch electrocutions, and told that when the job of executioner became vacant.

Public executions were common in this country during the 19th and early 20th centuries. One of the last ones occurred in in Kentucky, when 20, people gathered to watch the hanging of a young African American male. Delight in brutality, pain, violence and death may always be with us. But surely we must conclude that it is best for the law not to encourage such impulses. When the government sanctions, commands, and ceremoniously carries out the execution of a prisoner, it lends support to this destructive side of human nature.

More than two centuries ago the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria, in his highly influential treatise On Crimes and Punishment , asserted: "The death penalty cannot be useful, because of the example of barbarity it gives men.

Such methods are inherently cruel and will always mock the attempt to cloak them in justice. Goldberg wrote, "The deliberate institutionalized taking of human life by the state is the greatest conceivable degradation to the dignity of the human personality. Capital appeals are not only costly; they are also time-consuming. The average death row inmate waits 12 years between sentencing and execution, and some sit in anticipation of their executions on death row for up to 30 years.

In solitary confinement, inmates are often isolated for 23 hours each day without access to training or educational programs, recreational activities, or regular visits. Such conditions have been demonstrated to provoke agitation, psychosis, delusions, paranoia, and self-destructive behavior. When death row inmates successfully appeal their sentences, they are transferred into the general inmate population, and when death row inmates are exonerated, they are promptly released into the community.

Death Row Syndrome gained international recognition during the extradition proceedings of Jens Soering, a German citizen arrested in England and charged with committing murder on American soil. Justice, it is often insisted, requires the death penalty as the only suitable retribution for heinous crimes.

This claim does not bear scrutiny, however. By its nature, all punishment is retributive. Therefore, whatever legitimacy is to be found in punishment as just retribution can, in principle, be satisfied without recourse to executions. Moreover, the death penalty could be defended on narrowly retributive grounds only for the crime of murder, and not for any of the many other crimes that have frequently been made subject to this mode of punishment rape, kidnapping, espionage, treason, drug trafficking.

Few defenders of the death penalty are willing to confine themselves consistently to the narrow scope afforded by retribution. In any case, execution is more than a punishment exacted in retribution for the taking of a life. As Nobel Laureate Albert Camus wrote, "For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months.

Such a monster is not encountered in private life. It is also often argued that death is what murderers deserve, and that those who oppose the death penalty violate the fundamental principle that criminals should be punished according to their just desserts — "making the punishment fit the crime. It would require us to betray traitors and kill multiple murderers again and again — punishments that are, of course, impossible to inflict.

Since we cannot reasonably aim to punish all crimes according to this principle, it is arbitrary to invoke it as a requirement of justice in the punishment of murder.

If, however, the principle of just deserts means the severity of punishments must be proportional to the gravity of the crime — and since murder is the gravest crime, it deserves the severest punishment — then the principle is no doubt sound.

Nevertheless, this premise does not compel support for the death penalty; what it does require is that other crimes be punished with terms of imprisonment or other deprivations less severe than those used in the punishment of murder. Criminals no doubt deserve to be punished, and the severity of the punishment should be appropriate to their culpability and the harm they have caused the innocent.

But severity of punishment has its limits — imposed by both justice and our common human dignity. Governments that respect these limits do not use premeditated, violent homicide as an instrument of social policy.

Some people who have lost a loved one to murder believe that they cannot rest until the murderer is executed. But this sentiment is by no means universal. Coretta Scott King has observed, "As one whose husband and mother-in-law have died the victims of murder and assassination, I stand firmly and unequivocally opposed to the death penalty for those convicted of capital offenses.

An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by a legalized murder.

It is almost impossible to describe the pain of losing a parent to a senseless murder. I remember lying in bed and praying, 'Please, God.

Please don't take his life too. And I knew, far too vividly, the anguish that would spread through another family — another set of parents, children, brothers, and sisters thrown into grief.

Across the nation, many who have survived the murder of a loved one have joined Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation or Murder Victims Families for Human Rights, in the effort to replace anger and hate toward the criminal with a restorative approach to both the offender and the bereaved survivors. Groups of murder victims family members have supported campaigns for abolition of the death penalty in Illinois, Connecticut, Montana and Maryland most recently.

But sparing them may help to spark a dialogue that one day will lead to the elimination of capital punishment. Lawrence Brewer, convicted of the notorious dragging death of James Byrd in Texas, was executed in Members of Mr.