Recently the United States saw its 200th person exonerated of a crime for which they were facing state execution but which they had not committed -- a statistic widely understood to represent a fraction of those wrongfully placed on death row, an unknown number of whom have been killed. Also in the past year, three more states have paused -- without yet finally banning -- capital punishment: Arizona, Ohio, and Tennessee. About three-quarters of the world's nations effectively no longer use the death penalty. No nation in Europe uses the death penalty. No nation in the Western Hemisphere uses it, except the United States. In the United States, 24 people were killed by states last year, and 10 so far this year. These include prisoners with serious mental illness, brain damage, intellectual disability, and/or strong claims of innocence, and prisoners executed over the objections of the victims’ families and despite requests from prosecutors to withdraw their death warrants. Presidential candidate Donald Trump is talking up an increased use of executions. Now would be a good time for remaining states to ban the barbarity of murder by the state. Click here to email your state legislators to ban capital punishment in your state.  |
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