In a cover story for TIME Magazine, award-winning journalist and TIME editor-at-large David Von Drehle explores the decline of capital punishment in the U.S. Von Drehle offers five significant reasons for the drop in death sentences, executions, and public support for the death penalty in the United States. First, he cites persistent problems with the administration of the death penalty: botched executions and a lengthy appeals process that fails to identify wrongful convictions for decades, if at all. Second, he points to the falling crime rate, showing that support for the death penalty has closely tracked the national murder rate throughout the 20th century. The third reason Von Drehle gives is the erosion of the justification for capital punishment. Life without parole sentences provide an alternative way to ensure that a murderer will never be released and an equivalent to “[w]hatever deterrent capital punishment provides.” He also describes the historical use of executions as a tool of white supremacy. While he notes that “the overt racism of the old order is now plainly unconstitutional,” the system remains plagued by economic bias, as a result of which “[t]hose without the capital get the punishment.” Fourth, he highlights the financial cost of the death penalty, which has led some prosecutors to decide that death sentences are simply not a priority within a constrained budget. Finally, he says, “Actions of the legislatures, lower-court judges and governors can all be read by the Supreme Court as signs of ‘evolving standards of decency’ in society,” which the U.S. Supreme Court may eventually see as justification for striking down capital punishment. He concludes, “The facts are irrefutable, and the logic is clear. Exhausted by so many years of trying to prop up this broken system, the court will one day throw in the towel.”

(D. Von Drehle, “The Death of the Death Penalty,” TIME Magazine, June 8, 2015.) See Arbitrariness and History of the Death Penalty.

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