Kenneth Jost of Congressional Quarterly has pre­pared a com­pre­hen­sive review of the death penal­ty in the U.S. for the recent edi­tion of the CQ Researcher. The overview looks at death penal­ty trends in the past 10 years, pub­lic opin­ion, and argu­ments for and against repeal­ing the death penal­ty. Jost quotes many experts, includ­ing DPIC’s Executive Director con­cern­ing the recent direc­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the U.S. “ ​‘The decline in the use of the death penal­ty is the con­tin­u­ing sto­ry,’ says Richard Dieter, the [Death Penalty Information] cen­ter’s Executive Director. ​‘Death sen­tences, exe­cu­tions, the num­ber of states that have the death penal­ty, and the size of the pop­u­la­tion on death row have all declined in the last decade.’ The Center’s sta­tis­tics bear out Dieter’s claims,” Jost writes. The report is accom­pa­nied by charts and graphs illus­trat­ing impor­tant trends, and con­tains a bib­li­og­ra­phy, chronol­o­gy, and places to go for more infor­ma­tion. The sig­nif­i­cance of the inno­cence issue, includ­ing the large num­ber of exon­er­a­tions from death row in recent years, is high­light­ed in the review. The vol­ume con­cludes with a debate on whether the death penal­ty deserves to be retained between DPIC’s Richard Dieter and Kent Scheidegger of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation.

(K. Jost, ​“Death Penalty Debates: Is the cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tem work­ing?,” 20 CQ Researcher 965 (Nov. 19, 2010). See Studies and DPIC’s Reports.

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