The ‘withering’ of the death penalty in America

One of the few overtly political statements that I am willing to make in this newsletter is that I am against the death penalty. Relatively few countries in the world still use the death penalty in their legal system, and I fail to see why the United States is one of them.

That’s why the recent report of the Death Penalty Information Center, an anti-death penalty group, was good news:

In its annual year-end report released Tuesday, the Center noted that, with the decision this year by New Hampshire to abolish the death penalty and the declaration of a moratorium in California, “half of all U.S. states have abolished the death penalty or now prohibit executions, and no state in New England authorizes capital punishment at all.”

The Center said the decline shows that “capital punishment continued to wither across the U.S. in 2019, disappearing completely in some regions and significantly eroding in others.” Source: Capital Punishment Continues to ‘Wither’ Across the U.S.: Report | The Crime Report

The death penalty is gone completely from New England and is used mainly by Southern states. There is also a move by the Federal government to revive the death penalty at the Federal level.