For the first time, the percent of Americans who think (well, know) that the death penalty is unfairly applied (50 percent) — is higher than those who think it is fairly applied (47 percent). Now, who knows what’s up with that three percent, but at least we’re heading in the right direction.
This is all according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which released its year-end report last week.
Hooray for half of America meeting the minimum level of basic human decency!
As the report goes on to mention, the race of not just the defendant but also the victim plays a significant role in who gets executed:
Once again, the majority of the crimes for which defendants were executed involved white victims (79%). Based on racial classifications from state departments of corrections, none of the 15 white defendants executed in 2023 were convicted of killing a person of color. Nine of the 24 prisoners executed were people of color. Four of the nine (44.4%) were people of color executed for killing white victims. In Texas, people of color were overrepresented among those executed in 2023. Five of the eight prisoners (62.5%) executed in Texas were people of color.
So hard not to have some questions for the “the death penalty is applied fairly” people. Is it that they are not aware of this? Or that this sounds fine to them? And if they’re not even aware, how can they say they know for sure it is fairly applied? It’s all very confusing.
The report also found that support for the death penalty, in general, has continued to decrease. A majority still support it, but that majority is now only 53 percent, which is definitely better than the 80 percent it was in 1990.
The United States is one of only four developed nations that still have and use the death penalty for ordinary (non-war) crimes, the other three being Japan, Taiwan, and the favorite nation of every internet right-wing psychopath, Singapore. In total, there are only 22 other nations that still carry out the death penalty for ordinary crimes, period, and the six to abolish it completely most recently are Kenya, Ghana, Papua New Guinea, Central African Republic, Sierra Leone, and Kazakhstan.
That, I am going to say, is a little embarrassing. It’s especially embarrassing when you consider how very bad we are at the death penalty, and I’m not just talking about the fact that states keep botching the lethal injections. This year alone, the report notes, three men on death row — John Huffington, Jesse Johnson, and Glynn Simmons — were fully exonerated. They were innocent! And our system found them guilty — guilty enough to kill them.
Now, I personally find the death penalty abhorrent regardless of whether or not someone is guilty, but it’s hard to imagine why anyone is okay with it when we know we sometimes get it wrong. This feels very obvious! I understand that vengeance feels good to people, but are the people who delight in the idea of executing people even paying attention when we do? Like, are they at least squeezing every ounce of catharsis they can out of every execution? Because I do not think they are.
On the sort of bright side, we only executed 24 people and only sentenced 21 people to death, which makes this the ninth year in a row that we’ve executed fewer than 30 people and sentenced fewer than 50 people to death. Yay?
Of course, that’s still more than literally every other country on earth that actually keeps records of how many people they kill other than Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and … nope, that’s it. Iran (700+), Saudi Arabia (121+) and Somalia (55). To be fair, several countries, including China, Vietnam, and North Korea, consider the number of people they kill to be a “state secret,” and we can probably figure that those numbers are pretty high.
The decrease in popularity of the death penalty weirdly comes at a time when Republicans are talking about using it for crimes that are not murder. Trump, notably, has been saying that he wants to sentence drug dealers to death, while Ron DeSantis signed two new death penalty laws this year.
Via AP:
Earlier this year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed bills enacting two new death penalty laws. One allows the death penalty in child rape convictions, despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling banning capital punishment in such cases. The other law ends a unanimous jury requirement in death penalty sentencing.
“If you commit a crime that is really, really heinous, you should have the ultimate punishment,” DeSantis said in May, commenting on the death penalty for child rape convictions.
No one is saying that’s not an especially heinous crime, but we also know, for a fact, that many people have been wrongfully convicted of it.
While these numbers do give me hope, I fully believe they are a lot lower than they should be, or would be if the death penalty were not such a third rail issue. More than anything, I would attribute the increase in opposition to the increase in attention being given to wrongful convictions. The more people know about how badly and frequently we screw this shit up, the less appealing such permanent solutions will be.
