Friday, December 16, 2011
Shifting Views on the Death Penalty
An interesting report from the Death Penalty Information Center, indicating that the death penalty was imposed 78 times this year. According to the report, that represents the lowest figure since 1976 (the year of Gregg v. Georgia, when capital punishment was reinstated as constitutional) and a dramatic decrease from last year alone. There are other figures worth taking a look at as well which suggest shifting attitudes toward the death penalty, though, as always, shifts in public opinion can be unpredictable.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/12/shifting-views-on-the-death-penalty.html
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the
comment feed
for this post.
I don't see any evidence of public attitudes. What is clear however is a remarkable -- an unexplained -- drop in the number of murders.
Following the gang-related jump in murders in the early 1990s, states really got serious about imposing the death penalty. It worked, and the murder rate had returned to a more conventional and tolerable level by 2000. After leveling off there for seven or eight years, the murder rate dropped suddenly in the last two years. Predictably, the urgency of imposing death diminished pari passu.
The underlying "attitude," that death is a legitimate option to be used to defend human life, when the circumstances warrant it, has not changed for centuries, but the situation on the ground has witnessed waves of social crisis and waves of social peace, and attendant waves of vigorous application of the guillotine.
We owe to John Paul II the observation that, when he was writing, the entire West was experiencing one of those epochs of social peace. Thank god!