Why the death penalty is in decline across the United States Across the country, the death penalty is dying. Twenty-two states have abandoned state-sanctioned executions, including nine in the last fifteen years. Of the twenty-eight states that still have the death penalty, eight have not had an execution in over a decade.
And public support for the death penalty has declined from 80% of the surveyed population in the early 1990s to approximately 50% today. As the death penalty slowly withers away, Todd C. Peppers, Jamie Almallen, and Mary Welek Atwell bring together a number of distinguished death-penalty scholars, activists, and attorneys to take an accounting of the damage inflicted by the machinery of death.
Contributors to the book point to a range of different pathologies which have caused politicians and voters to turn against capital punishment, from unacceptable rates of false convictions and racially motivated prosecutions, to a clemency process poisoned by political factors.
Essay topics include various dimensions of the death penalty, including racial and gender bias; economic costs; the conviction of juveniles, the mentally ill, and the factually innocent; Supreme Court decisions; and the failure of the death penalty to serve as a deterrent against crime.
This important volume is an up-to-date accounting of the current state and, as the contributors argue, the future demise of the death penalty.
| Format |
Häftad |
| Omfång |
328 sidor |
| Språk |
Engelska |
| Förlag |
New York University Press |
| Utgivningsdatum |
2025-07-01 |
| ISBN |
9781479819645 |
