Support for – and Use of – the Death Penalty Drop in 2011

 

In 2011 “the use of the death penalty continued to decline by almost every measure.  Executions, death sentences, public support, the number of states with the death penalty all dropped from previous years,” said Richard Dieter, Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), in a press release announcing the publication of DPIC’s year-end report.  In fact, with 78 death sentences handed down, 2011 was the first year since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 that the number of new death sentences fell below 100. 

 

Of the 43 executions (down from 46 in 2010), 19 of them – 44% – were in states targeted by the Issue Team: Texas (13), Ohio (5), and Missouri (1).  The other two targeted states, California and Maryland, combined with the first three to account for 39% or 1,256 of the 3,251 people on death rows across the country; California tops the list with 721.   

 

Support for the death penalty continued to erode in 2011.  The Gallup Poll recorded the lowest level of support and the highest level of opposition in almost 40 years. Only 61 percent supported the death penalty, compared to 80 percent in 1994. Thirty-five percent were opposed, compared to 16 percent in 1994.

 

Even more encouraging were the results of a more in-depth CNN poll.  When respondents were given a choice between the death penalty and life without parole for those who commit murder, fifty percent chose a life sentence compared to 48 percent choosing death.

 

 

Why the Death Penalty Is Slowly Dying

 

“There has long been an idea about how the death penalty would end in the United States,” writes Adam Cohen for Time.  “The Supreme Court would one day hand down a sweeping ruling saying that it is unconstitutional in all cases. But that is not what is happening. Instead of top-down abolition, we seem to be getting it from the bottom up — governors, state legislatures, judges and juries quietly deciding not to support capital punishment.”

He reviews some of the reasons why opposition to capital punishment is growing:  the growing number of exonerations from death row, the costs of implementing the death penalty, even public “squeamishness” following botched executions. 

He concludes that “Five (U.S. Supreme Court) Justices, with a stroke of their pens, could end capital punishment nationwide. But … (w)hat we are seeing now is not a small group of judges setting policy. It is a large number of Americans gradually losing their enthusiasm for putting people to death.”

Ohio Task Force Asks

“When Should Prosecutors Pursue Capital Punishment?”

 

“It didn’t take long for an Ohio death penalty task force to disagree on something. The issue: how county prosecutors make the important decision when to pursue the ultimate punishment.” Thus began a November 3 account in The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch regarding the first meeting of the Ohio Supreme Court Joint Task Force on the Death Penalty. Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor had convened the 21-member task force, comprised of judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and state lawmakers, “to produce a fair, impartial and balanced analysis of the state's law … not to decide whether Ohio should have capital punishment.” “The committee will review Ohio's current laws, practices elsewhere, data and costs,” says the Associated Press. “It will also review a 2007 report released by the American Bar Association that called for a moratorium while problems the report said it had identified were examined. That report didn't go far because of the perception that several of the researchers were biased against the death penalty.” The task force has one year to complete its work.

 

Oregon Governor Declares Moratorium on Executions

 

“Gov. John Kitzhaber has done the right thing in following his conscience,” declared The Catholic Sentinel (Oregon) in an editorial. “Haunted by acquiescence in two executions during the 1990s, the governor would not sign off on another and has called instead for a moratorium on the death penalty and statewide discussion on the practice.” Oregon reinstated the death penalty in 1984 and has carried out two executions since then. In neither case did Gov. Kitzhaber intervene, decisions he now regrets. The November announcement immediately halted an execution scheduled for December. The moratorium will last until he leaves office; his current term expires in January 2015.

 

World Day of “Cities for Life / Cities Against the Death Penalty”

November 30th is the anniversary of the first abolition of the death penalty by one European state, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, in the year 1786. In 2002 the Community of Sant'Egidio began the World Day of Cities for Life/Cities Against the Death Penalty initiative to commemorate this event and to mobilize the worldwide abolition of the death penalty. Participants are asked to light a candle – or to illuminate a significant public monument – in a show of support. As of Nov. 11, 2011, 1,404 cities in 87 countries had signed up – 173 more cities and 4 more countries than a year ago. The list of cities includes 25 in the United States – sadly, the same number as the last two years. (Of those 25, 22 are in states targeted by the Issue Team!)

Interfaith Dialogue on the Death Penalty Held in San Antonio

The Marianist Social Justice Collaborative Anti-Death Penalty Issue Team was one of many sponsors, including St. Mary's University, of the Interfaith Dialogue on the Death Penalty held in San Antonio on Monday, October 24th. Organized by the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, seven religious leaders provided their faith's perspective on the call to abolish the death penalty and took questions from the audience. The evening concluded with closing remarks and a prayer by Auxiliary Bishop Oscar Cantu of the Archdiocese of San Antonio. To see more photos and to watch videos from the evening visit: http://tcadp.org/what-we-do/religious-outreach/

A Catholic Call to Abolish the Death Penalty

On September 21, 2011 there were two high profile executions in the United Sates, those of Troy Davis in Georgia and Lawrence Brewer in Texas. This prompted a group of theologians, scholars, and social justice advocates to issue a public call for the abolition of the death penalty in the US. With a growing list of signatories (366 as of October 16, 2011), the document is a succinct but powerful summation of both moral and theological reasons to oppose capital punishment. The authors write that the “Gospel message of forgiveness and love of enemies presents a difficult challenge, especially to those who have lost loved ones at the hands of a murderer. Yet, the Gospel teaches us how to become fully human: love, not hatred and revenge, liberates us.”

Justice Scalia and Catholic Teaching on the Death Penalty

Recently Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia spoke at Duquesne University Law School. “If I thought that Catholic doctrine held the death penalty to be immoral,” said Scalia, “I would resign. I could not be a part of a system that imposes it.” His statement has spurred a debate, in part focused on whether, in the words of Amy Sullivan, “Scalia’s insistence that the Catholic Church does not consider capital punishment immoral rests on the word “practically” in the Church’s catechism.” The debate extends to consternation at the lack of criticism of Scalia’s remarks from the U.S. bishops.

Ohio and the Death Penalty

“Gov. John Kasich of Ohio postponed for a month the state’s next execution. The decision is an admission that Ohio’s management of the death penalty is broken and further proof that the machinery of death cannot be operated responsibly anywhere. “ Thus began a recent New York Times editorial calling on “every state with the penalty on the books to outlaw this barbaric punishment.” The editorial discusses a recent ruling from a federal district judge who cited many ways in which Ohio (one of the states targeted by the Team) has deviated from its own rules. To quote the judge, “This is nonsense.”

An Embarrassment of Hitches

Because of recent court challenges and a shortage of certain drugs, states across the country have recently been scrambling to revise their lethal injection protocols. But as Amnesty International says in a recent report, “no amount of refining execution procedures can disguise the incompatibility of the death penalty with human dignity or mask the global abolitionist trend currently being bucked by the USA. And while the USA’s use of lethal injection may spare its politicians from having to defend more visually gruesome execution methods, the country’s continuing pursuit of judicial killing by any method deals a serious if not fatal blow to its claims to be a progressive force for human rights.”

 

The Death Penalty Information Center writes that Amnesty's report, entitled "An Embarrassment of Hitches: Reflections on the Death Penalty, 35 Years After Gregg v. Georgia, As States Scramble for Lethal Injection Drugs," is a look at recent developments in the lethal injection controversy in the U.S. and provides an overview of the death penalty since it was reinstated in 1976 in Gregg v. Georgia.

 

Struck by Lightning

 

To commemorate the 35th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Gregg v. Georgia (issued July 2, 1976) – the decision which reinstated capital punishment after a four-year moratorium – the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) has released Struck by Lightning: The Continuing Arbitrariness of the Death Penalty Thirty-Five Years After Its Re-instatement in 1976. The report shows that race, geography, money, and other arbitrary factors continue to make receiving the death penalty as random as being “struck by lightning,” as Justice Potter Stewart observed.

According to the DPIC, “A majority of the nine Justices who served on the Supreme Court in 1976 when the death penalty was reinstated eventually concluded the experiment had failed. Three of the justices in the Gregg majority (Justices Blackmun, Powell and Stevens) later changed their minds and would have joined Justices Marshall and Brennan in banning capital punishment as unconstitutional.”

Repeal Measure Introduced in California

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that “California's death penalty could be repealed by voters under a measure that is backed by two unlikely people: the author of the 1978 ballot initiative that greatly expanded the scope of capital crimes and a former San Quentin warden who oversaw four executions. ‘It is wasteful and counterproductive to public safety to spend our precious, precious resources pretending we have a death penalty when we know the sentence will not be carried out 99 percent of the time,’ Jeanne Woodford said. Woodford is the former San Quentin warden and former director of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation; she now runs a nonprofit that seeks to abolish the death penalty. Don Heller, who wrote the 1978 ballot measure that expanded capital punishment, said he now ‘fervently’ believes capital punishment should be abolished.”