“As an executive and investor, I find it unthinkable that we continue to pour public resources into such a fundamentally broken system. If any company or product I evaluated had an error rate comparable to the death penalty — where for every eight people executed, one person has been exonerated — I would never invest,” Matthew Stepka states in his op-ed https://tinyurl.com/563dphnj ,”California’s death penalty is bad business. Newsom can help dismantle it” in the Sacramento Bee.” He notes that “California, now the world’s 4th largest economy, should be a beacon of innovation, efficiency, and good governance. Instead, our commitment to a broken death penalty system suggests a preference for arbitrary decision-making over evidence-based policy, reckless spending over fiscal prudence, and state-sanctioned retribution over fairness and justice. It is contradictions like these that have led over 500 business leaders around the world, including myself, to sign a declaration advocating for the worldwide abolition of the death penalty.” He notes that Gov. Gavin Newsom “has already made great strides” toward correcting the state’s broken death penalty system. Still, he can do so much more because “he has the power to erase the risk of California someday backsliding into executions by taking steps to commute every death sentence in the state to life without the possibility of parole.” He adds, “There is precedent for this: More than half a dozen governors have granted universal clemency to everyone sentenced to death in their states.”
“Oklahoma’s death penalty is losing legitimacy in the public’s mind and — in the not too distant future — it may end,” Conservatives Concerned Executive Director Demetrius Minor states in his editorial, “Oklahoma is ready to leave the death penalty in the past,” in the Oklahoman https://tinyurl.com/2s3pumfc (paywall). Minor bases his belief on several factors, including the fact that, despite the state’s record of having the highest number of executions per capita in the U.S., its “four executions last year involved death sentences handed down decades earlier,” and that a jury hasn’t issued a new death sentence in the past three years. Minor also cites a recent poll showing that 77 percent of Oklahomans support a halt to executions to review the system, and the introduction by two Republican state legislators of a bill calling for a moratorium on capital punishment.
“The modern international human rights movement began with the U.N. Charter and the U.N. General Assembly’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Although the movement to abolish the death penalty is rooted in the Enlightenment, global advocacy to halt executions and to abolish capital punishment has accelerated exponentially in recent decades,” Baltimore School of Law Professor John D. Bessler writes https://tinyurl.com/38vynpv2 in the Minnesota Journal of International Law. Bessler believes that, “As more international advocacy occurs, it now seems very clear that, in time, death sentences and executions will be found to be totally incompatible with [international] law’s strict prohibition of torture because an immutable characteristic of the death penalty is that it utilizes official and torturous death threats. If the world is to achieve truly universal human rights, then everyone—the innocent and the guilty alike—must be protected from acts of torture and cruelty.”
After the 1995 film, “Dead Man Walking,” based on Sister Helen Prejean’s memoir about her friendship with Patrick Sonnier, which began as pen pals and ended with his execution in 1984 in Louisiana, for the murders of teenagers Loretta Bourque and David LeBlanc, support for the death penalty has waned, Austin Sarat writes in his piece https://tinyurl.com/mv9n43ku in “The Conversation.” At the time of the film’s release, he notes, 80% of the American public supported the death penalty, and today, support has “declined to around 50%.” “As a death penalty scholar,” who has “studied the changes” in opinions about the death penalty, Sarat maintains that the Catholic Church’s “anti-death penalty teaching has helped provide both a moral foundation and political respectability for those working to end the death penalty.” And the result is that “the impact of the church is reflected in the fact that in the past 50 years, Catholic support for capital punishment fell more than it did among evangelicals, mainline Protestants, Black Protestants, and other religious groups.”