The Death Penalty Information Center’s 2004 Year End Report noting the declines in death sentences, executions, and the number of people on death row was covered by about 200 news outlets throughout the U.S. and overseas. Some newspapers took the occasion to editorialize about the state of the death penalty:

Detroit Free Press

The death penalty, thankfully, is making its own slow demise in the United States. Given the legal, moral and economic problems with the death penalty, all 38 states that allow it should place a moratorium on executions, as Illinois has done.

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The practical and moral problems of capital punishment ought to be decisive. DNA evidence has already shown that a significant number of people on death row – most of them poor or minorities – were wrongly convicted. Even one would have been too many.
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Nothing, including common sense, suggests that the death penalty deters, either. Indeed, non-death-penalty states have had lower murder rates than those using it, reports the Death Penalty Information Center. The murder rate increased last year in Texas and Oklahoma, the two states carrying out the most executions.

Most murderers don’t consider consequences. If they did, they wouldn’t commit a crime that carries a penalty of life in prison without parole. Such a sentence is the most just, practical and economical sentence for those convicted of the most heinous crimes. And unlike the death penalty, it is reversible in the case of an innocent person wrongly convicted.

(Detroit Free Press, December 20, 2004).

The Daily Camera (Colorado)

The endless coverage of [Scott] Peterson’s case did focus national attention on the issue of capital punishment,… [b]ut it tended to obscure rather than illuminate the larger story: a continuing decline in the number of executions in the United States.
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[E]vidence suggests that the decline in executions is a long-range trend, not an aberration. More than ever, capital punishment was a regional phenomenon in 2004, when 85 percent of all executions took place in one area of the country (the South) and 40 percent took place in one state (Texas). Whole areas of the United States are abandoning capital punishment altogether or reserved it for isolated and truly extreme cases.
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High profile cases make headlines; long-range developments often do not. In the case of capital punishment, however, the slow withering of support is too clear and significant to ignore. With each passing year, more Americans are questioning the death penalty – and fewer prisoners are dying at the hands of the state. That’s a trend well worth encouraging.

(The Daily Camera, December 27, 2004).

Lancaster Eagle-Gazette (Ohio)

Ohio executed more people in 2004 than in the previous year, the reverse of a national trend toward fewer executions, a study says.
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Nationally, there were 59 executions in 2004, compared to 98 in 1999.

Ohio’s total this year, however, was the highest since 1949 when 15 were put to death.
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The number of death sentences statewide continues to decline from 18 in 1996 to five this year.

More and more people across the country would say that decline is the right way to go and the death sentence should be eliminated completely.

Changing public attitudes toward the death sentence should prompt lawmakers to take a renewed serious look at the controversial and emotional issue.

(Lancaster Eagle-Gazette, December 19, 2004).

See DPIC’s 2004 Year End Report. See also, Editorials.