The vast majority of U. Use this tool to compare the groups on some key topics and their demographics. About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world.
It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions.
It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts. Newsletters Donate My Account. Research Topics. Note: This is an update to a post originally published Aug. Share this link:. Lower support for death penalty tracks with falling crime rates, more exonerations. Botched execution in Oklahoma renews death-penalty debate. Are you a Faith and Flag Conservative? Progressive Left? Or somewhere in between? This sample of freakish and arbitrary innocence determinations also speaks directly to the unceasing concern that there are many more innocent people on death rows across the country — as well as who have been executed.
Several factors seen in the above sample of cases help explain why the judicial system cannot guarantee that justice will never miscarry: overzealous prosecution, mistaken or perjured testimony, race, faulty police work, coerced confessions, the defendant's previous criminal record, inept and under-resourced defense counsel, seemingly conclusive circumstantial evidence, and community pressure for a conviction, among others. And when the system does go wrong, it is often volunteers from outside the criminal justice system — journalists, for example — who rectify the errors, not the police or prosecutors.
To retain the death penalty in the face of the demonstrable failures of the system is unacceptable, especially since there are no strong overriding reasons to favor the death penalty. Prisoners are executed in the United States by any one of five methods; in a few jurisdictions the prisoner is allowed to choose which one he or she prefers:. The traditional mode of execution, hanging , is an option still available in Delaware, New Hampshire and Washington. Death on the gallows is easily bungled: If the drop is too short, there will be a slow and agonizing death by strangulation.
If the drop is too long, the head will be torn off. Two states, Idaho and Utah, still authorize the firing squad. The prisoner is strapped into a chair and hooded. A target is pinned to the chest. Five marksmen, one with blanks, take aim and fire. Throughout the twentieth century, electrocution has been the most widely used form of execution in this country, and is still utilized in eleven states, although lethal injection is the primary method of execution.
The condemned prisoner is led — or dragged — into the death chamber, strapped into the chair, and electrodes are fastened to head and legs. When the switch is thrown the body strains, jolting as the voltage is raised and lowered. Often smoke rises from the head. There is the awful odor of burning flesh. No one knows how long electrocuted individuals retain consciousness.
In , the electrocution of John Evans in Alabama was described by an eyewitness as follows:. Evans' body. It lasted thirty seconds. Sparks and flames erupted … from the electrode tied to Mr. Evans' left leg. His body slammed against the straps holding him in the electric chair and his fist clenched permanently. The electrode apparently burst from the strap holding it in place. A large puff of grayish smoke and sparks poured out from under the hood that covered Mr.
Evans' face. An overpowering stench of burnt flesh and clothing began pervading the witness room. Two doctors examined Mr. Evans and declared that he was not dead. Evans was administered a second thirty second jolt of electricity. The stench of burning flesh was nauseating. More smoke emanated from his leg and head. Again, the doctors examined Mr. At that time, I asked the prison commissioner, who was communicating on an open telephone line to Governor George Wallace, to grant clemency on the grounds that Mr.
Evans was being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. The request …was denied. At , the doctors pronounced him dead. The execution of John Evans took fourteen minutes. The introduction of the gas chamber was an attempt to improve on electrocution. In this method of execution the prisoner is strapped into a chair with a container of sulfuric acid underneath. 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. In , the Supreme Court of Rhode Island held that the state's statute imposing a mandatory death sentence for an inmate who killed a fellow prisoner was unconstitutional. The legislature repealed the law and removed it from the state criminal code in In , the New York Court of Appeals held that a portion of the state's death penalty law was unconstitutional.
In , the court ruled that its prior holding applied to the last remaining person on the state's death row. The legislature has voted down attempts to restore the statute.
In March , New Mexico voted to abolish the death penalty. However, the repeal was not retroactive, leaving two people on the state's death row. The New Mexico Supreme Court vacated those sentences on June 28, and ordered the two prisoners be resentenced to life in prison.
In April , the Connecticut legislature voted to abolish the death penalty for future crimes. By its terms, the repeal law did not affect the status of the 11 prisoners then on the state's death row.
The Connecticut Supreme Court subsequently ruled in August that the death penalty violated the state constitution.
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