EDITORIALS: ​“The Year in Death”

The Washington Post editorialized about the death penalty in 2005, commenting on many of the points made in DPIC’s Year End Report:

[T]he overall tendency is unmistakable: At least for now, with crime and murder rates low and the threat of wrongful convictions on people’s minds, the death penalty does not have the same attraction that it once had.

Finally ending the death penalty in America, however, will not happen quickly. Despite any number of DNA exonerations and some serious questions raised about whether innocent people have been executed, public support for capital punishment remains unnervingly strong, if not quite as strong as it was a few years ago. What is possible now is to begin translating the apparently lessened enthusiasm for executions into laws that permit it less often. In only a few states does capital punishment operate as a day-to-day feature of the criminal justice system. In some states that permit it, it is never — or almost never — used at all. The example of New York shows that when policymakers are forced to confront the utility of a largely theoretical death penalty, they may turn their backs on it or at least restrict it. It is time for opponents of the death penalty to begin systematically offering other states that opportunity as well.

(Washington Post, Dec. 31, 2005). See DPIC’s 2005 Year End Report.