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The
Year in Death: 2000
IT'S
AT least conceivable that 2000 was a turning point for the death
penalty in America, during which the deep flaws in the capital
punishment system finally began to sink in with the public. We hope
so. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the year saw
85 executions, down 13 percent from 1999. Nearly half of those
executions took place in Texas, and 77 occurred in just seven
states -- Texas (40), Oklahoma (11), Virginia (8), Florida (6),
Missouri (5), Alabama (4) and Arizona (3). As this handful of
jurisdictions continued to kill convicts at a good clip, other
states were looking critically at capital punishment. Illinois Gov.
George Ryan placed a moratorium on the death penalty in his state,
and the New Hampshire legislature actually voted to repeal that
state's capital punishment law, though the bill ultimately was
vetoed by Gov. Jeanne Shaheen.
Even some of the states that have most enthusiastically
embraced the death penalty are beginning to ask questions. Both the
Virginia Supreme Court and the federal courts have been applying
welcome new scrutiny to death cases in the commonwealth, for
example, and executions there dropped notably over the past year.
Officials in Virginia -- stung by the vindication of former death
row inmate Earl Washington Jr. -- have also begun working on
much-needed reforms such as abolition of the rule against
introducing new evidence of innocence more than 21 days after
conviction. One year's figures don't make a trend, of course, and
the execution rate has dipped in individual years before, only to
head back up. According to Justice Department data, the pace of
executions dropped steadily from the mid-1940s to the early 1970s,
when capital punishment was abolished. When the penalty was
reinstated in 1976, however, the rate began rising again, and
lately it has been approaching levels not seen in decades. And
while actual executions declined last year, the death row
population keeps growing -- meaning that the pace could easily
resume. But the country has lately seen enough examples of the
system's caprice and mistakes to reconsider capital punishment.
Between the indifferent defense counsel many capital defendants
receive and the number of death row inmates who've been cleared and
released, it is increasingly clear that the death penalty is a
tragic accident waiting to happen -- if, indeed, one hasn't already.
Do we have to wait for DNA evidence to prove conclusively that an
innocent person was wrongly executed before we finally reform
capital punishment?
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