U.S. has growing misgivings about capital punishment
The nation’s 1,000th execution since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 is scheduled to occur early today, barring a last-minute stay.
But the expected execution of Kenneth Boyd in North Carolina for murdering his wife and her father comes at a time of growing misgivings over the death penalty as reflected in jury verdicts, opinion polls and the actions of courts and state legislatures.
Death sentences have declined to their lowest level in three decades, with juries sentencing 125 people to death last year, compared with an average of 290 in the 1990s. The number of inmates executed last year was the lowest since 1996, and the Supreme Court has twice in the last three years limited who can be punished with death.
Public opinion polls show that nearly two-thirds of Americans support the death penalty, but that is a significant drop from the 1994 peak, when 80 percent of respondents told Gallup pollsters they were in favor. When asked by Gallup if they would endorse executions if the alternative of life without parole were available, support fell to 50 percent.
Amid the refinement of DNA techniques and the sporadic release of inmates from death row because of uncertain guilt, a growing number of people tell pollsters they believe innocent defendants have been executed. Although the majority of cases over the last three decades have been upheld, legal errors and sometimes poor defense work revealed during layers of appeals have persuaded many Americans that the system is imperfect.
“There’s a skepticism about the accuracy of the system and, to some degree, the fairness,” said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “It’s not quite the ticket to the statehouse if you promise to execute more and more and speed it up. You have religious leaders voicing concerns. You have conservatives. The lines aren’t as clear as they were before.”
In Virginia, which has executed more people since 1976 than any state but Texas, Gov. Mark Warner this week commuted the sentence of Robin Lovitt because the state threw out what might have been conclusive evidence, making this the first year since 1983 that Virginia did not have an execution.
The New York legislature this year stopped short of renewing the state’s death penalty law, which a court had declared invalid. North Carolina, where condemned prisoner Alan Gell was acquitted in a retrial with the help of evidence initially suppressed, created a commission to study how the death penalty operates. California, home to the nation’s largest death row, with 648 inmates, did likewise.
Elsewhere, legislation on the desk of Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle is designed to improve witness identification procedures, require electronic recording of interrogations and ensure preservation of DNA evidence. If police do not record the interviews, the jury would be told that police violated the law.
Texas has executed more than one-third of the men and women put to death since 1976, as well as 19 of the 55 death row inmates executed this year. With no more scheduled this month, this year’s total will fall well below the state’s eight-year average of 28.
University of Texas death penalty expert Jordan Steiker attributes the slowdown largely to federal court concerns, notably the 2002 Supreme Court decision to bar the execution of the mentally retarded, and this year’s ruling decision prohibiting the execution of juvenile offenders.
A poll conducted by Rice University sociologist Stephen Klineberg found that even in Texas’ Harris County, where more defendants are sentenced to die than anywhere else in the country, support for the death penalty fell from 68 percent in 1999 to 60 percent this year. In response to a separate question, 53 percent favored life without parole as an alternative.