Public support for capital punishment continues to wane nationwide, an end-of-year report recently published by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) has claimed.
The nonprofit suggested that a factor contributing to this downturn was the significant number of executions this year that the report calls “problematic.” For instance, 72% of those prisoners in 2022 allegedly showed signs of impairment, including mental illness, intellectual disability, or serious trauma related to military service or childhood abuse, the report reads.
Above all, however, the DPIC’s report pointed to how seven of the 20 execution attempts in the U.S. seemingly encountered procedural problems or took an extensive amount of time to perform, dubbing 2022 the “Year of the Botched Execution.”
For instance, Arizona faced several challenges with the three executions performed in the state in 2022 since personnel had difficulty locating suitable veins for IV lines to deliver the lethal injection. Two executions failed in Alabama for the same reason.
As a result of various alleged blunders, some states have begun to review their existing protocols for capital punishment.
Across the U.S., this year saw a lower number of executions take place — 18 in total — than in any pre-pandemic year since 1991. Similarly, only 20 death sentences were handed out in 2022, marking the fewest in any year in the U.S. in the past 50 years.
“All the indicators point to the continuing decline in capital punishment, and the movement away from the death penalty is durable,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the DPIC.
On the state level, 37 states have either abolished the death penalty or not carried out an execution in over a decade, according to NBC 5.
In Oregon — a state which has not executed a prisoner since 1997 — the death sentences of all 17 of its death row inmates were commuted on Tuesday by Governor Kate Brown. They will serve life sentences without parole instead.
On the federal level, there have been no executions since January 2021.
In the last six months of his term, Trump carried out 13 federal executions, overseeing more executions than any president in 120 years, according to the AP. In July 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland imposed a moratorium on federal executions.
On the level of the American citizenry, a Gallup poll suggested that public support of the death penalty has declined steadily for the last 28 years, from 80% in 1994 to 55% in 2022.
While Dunham attributes this decrease to the supposedly poor conduct of those carrying out the death penalty “undermining public confidence,” a majority of Americans still appear to support punishing convicted murderers in this manner.
In an opinion piece published by The Epoch Times titled “Capital Punishment Still Serves Its Purpose. Don’t Abolish It.”, Newsweek editor Josh Hammer posited that the death penalty speaks to a “long-standing tradition that the worst of the worst in society should face the ultimate punishment.”
“There are some crimes for which even life imprisonment without parole simply does not suffice,” Hammer wrote. “If the classical definition of justice is to reward good and punish evil, then there is no more quintessentially just act than to execute murderers.”
Nonetheless, the debate wages on in Texas as well, where executions have slowed to only five this year. This figure is well below the state’s historical high of 40 in 2000, as recorded by the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. The decrease led the group’s director, Kristin Houlé Cuellar, to suggest that Texas’ “era of excessive use of the death penalty is gone.”
Earlier this year Texas State Rep. Jeff Leach said he is conflicted with the idea of the death penalty and said he hopes lawmakers can work to make sure “there’s no chance that we’re executing an innocent Texan.”
“To say I’m wrestling with the very existence of the death penalty in Texas would be a dramatic understatement,” Leach said.
