Washington Post

THE YEAR 2001 saw the con­tin­u­a­tion of what now appears to be a dra­mat­ic decline in the use of the death penal­ty in America. In 1999, 98 peo­ple were put to death. That num­ber fell to 85 in 2000. But in the year just past, accord­ing to data from the Death Penalty Information Center, 66 peo­ple were exe­cut­ed. Texas, which has the dubi­ous dis­tinc­tion of lead­ing the nation in state-spon­sored killing, cut exe­cu­tions by more than half (from 40 in 2000 to 17 in 2001) and lost the lead to Oklahoma, which exe­cut­ed 18 con­victs in 2001. The top five death penal­ty states in 2001 — Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri (7), North Carolina (5) and Georgia (4) — account­ed for 77 per­cent of exe­cu­tions. But no oth­er state — includ­ing Virginia, with its his­tor­i­cal­ly hyper­ac­tive death cham­ber — exe­cut­ed more than two people.

The decline is an encour­ag­ing devel­op­ment for death penal­ty oppo­nents. But cau­tion is war­rant­ed. The decrease is only part­ly the result of a chang­ing polit­i­cal cli­mate. True, a com­bi­na­tion of declin­ing crime rates and a con­tin­u­ing wave of DNA exon­er­a­tions has made the pub­lic and the courts more skep­ti­cal of death sen­tences. And demo­graph­ic quirks in the death row pop­u­la­tion have played a sig­nif­i­cant, per­haps even pre­dom­i­nant, role. But the cli­mate could eas­i­ly shift back. Now that it’s fal­ter­ing, the boom­ing econ­o­my, which pre­sum­ably facil­i­tat­ed the decrease in crime over the past sev­er­al years, could end up push­ing crime rates in pre­cise­ly the oppo­site direc­tion. Views on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and the need to deal with ter­ror­ists with the firmest of hands also may have been hard­ened by the Sept. 11 attacks. Without sys­tem­at­ic reform at both the state and fed­er­al lev­els — some­thing that has begun but is far from com­plete — the cur­rent favor­able trend in death penal­ty use could eas­i­ly take a turn for the worse.

Unfortunately, one dis­turb­ing counter-trend has already been seen. In 2001, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment began exe­cut­ing peo­ple again, for the first time in decades. Shifting the fed­er­al death penal­ty into gear at exact­ly the time fed­er­al author­i­ties ought to be push­ing states to reform their own sys­tems sends the wrong mes­sage. This prob­lem will only grow worse if fed­er­al ter­ror­ism tri­als become com­mon. Pressure in those cas­es for the death penal­ty may be even stronger than in rou­tine crim­i­nal cas­es. It is, there­fore, all the more crit­i­cal to remem­ber why cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment must be abol­ished. The death penal­ty does­n’t deter crime — much less ter­ror­ism. It is a capri­cious act toward human life on the state’s part. And it can pro­duce dis­as­trous, irreversible errors.