In 2023, the annual crime survey taken by Gallup Polls reported that the majority of Americans think the death penalty is applied unfairly; this represents a record high of 50% of Americans believing capital punishment is wrong versus the 47% who believe it is fair, a change in the majority that happened for the first time since the survey began in 2000. Though the difference between the two percentages remains small, the statistics prove a shift in how Americans view capital punishment. The death penalty is an outdated and ineffective justice system with many flaws that prove its inadequacy.
Despite the common argument that capital punishment is a deterrent for violent crimes, murder rates in states without the death penalty are lower than those with the death penalty, a difference that has only grown since 1990. Ten of the twelve states without the death penalty have homicide rates below the national average while half the states with the death penalty have homicide rates above the national average. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, homicide rates in states that execute people have been higher than those that do not by 48-101% during the last twenty years, proving the ineffectiveness of this system and discrediting the argument that it is necessary to dissuade violent crimes.
According to the New York Times, all of the death penalty methods have frequent examples of executions gone wrong, even with the more “humane” methods of lethal injection and, as of this year in Alabama with the case of a prisoner named Kenneth Smith, asphyxiation by nitrogen gas. It raises the question of whether these faulty executions fall under the category of “cruel and unusual punishment,” violating the Eighth Amendment. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, which goes into further detail about botched executions, 276, or roughly 3% of executions in the US from 1890-2010 went wrong. Lethal injection has the highest rate of errors despite being the current most common method. Botched executions result in unnecessary torture for the prisoner, a torture that the country has consistently attempted to avoid by developing newer, more “humane” methods throughout the history of capital punishment.
Studies also show that race has always played a role in death sentences. In the 1987 Supreme Court case Mcleskey v. Kemp, it was found that the defendants most likely to receive a death sentence were those who were black and killed white victims. Since then, research has only supported these findings, further confirming that black killers of white victims face the death penalty more than any other killers.
The death penalty has often been used as a political tool rather than for the justice it is supposed to achieve. According to the New York Times, supporting the death penalty has often been used as a political strategy to prove to voters that the candidate is stern on crime. This was represented in the 1995 movie, Dead Man Walking, directed by Tim Robbins and based on the true stories recorded in the 1993 book by the same name. This non-fiction work by Sister Helene Prejean, a Roman Catholic nun, detailed her time as a spiritual advisor for prisoners on death row. The movie adapts her experiences and features the governor of Louisiana who sets the date for the execution of Matthew Poncelet, the focal convict of the film. While the governor does not personally support the death penalty, he backs it in hopes of gaining support in an upcoming election, a tactic that has been reflected in real-world America. This brings into question the validity of capital punishment as a tool for justice when it has a history of turning into a political issue instead.
