Each December, the team at the Death Penalty Information Center provides an enormous and essential service to justice reform when it releases its annual year-end report. The report tells the comprehensive story—in statistics and graphics, in narrative, and in expert analysis—of the death penalty in the U.S. for the previous 12 months.
The reports of recent years document an undeniably positive trend. Capital punishment is on the way out. Some highlights:
- 2019 is the fifth straight year of fewer than 30 executions. In fact, the 22 executions this year marks the second lowest number in the past 30 years.
- The number of death sentences also continues to plunge. There have been less than 50 new sentences for each of the last five years.
- With full repeal of the death penalty in New Hampshire plus the moratorium imposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in California, half of all states do not have a functioning death penalty system.
But the report makes clear the horrifying truth about the death penalty—our most vulnerable people are those most likely to suffer the injustice of an execution. Of the 22 men executed in 2019, 19 of them suffered from serious mental illness, some type of brain impairment, substantial childhood trauma, or some combination of the three. We failed each of those men over and over by not recognizing and treating their trauma before it led to violence.
Two of the men — one in Alabama and one in Texas — had significant claims of innocence but were executed anyway. And several other of the 22 had “demonstrably faulty legal processes” that ultimately led to their executions.
As a nation, we should be ashamed.
Actions by the Trump Administration also complicate the positive developments. This past summer, the Department of Justice announced plans to resume federal executions after a 16-year hiatus. While we expected this to happen, the reality of it doesn’t change the fact that it is completely out of step with the way the country is moving.
For proof, look at the work that we have done through Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty. Over six years, that project has revealed that repealing the death penalty is a bipartisan issue. The nearly 1,000 media stories in the last year alone about growing conservative resistance to capital punishment demonstrates that this isn’t about a small constituency.
The latest national poll about the death penalty serves as further proof: about 60 percent of Americans do not believe the death penalty is an appropriate response to a murder.
Our work continues. We’re working in several states that have the ingredients to take big steps toward ending the death penalty in the next few years. Make no mistake — someday there won’t be the need for a year-end report on the death penalty.
