capital punishment

While a number of anti-death penalty advocates rightly highlight the exonerations, Elizabeth Bruenig prefers writing about the “confessed and admittedly guilty … since we all already agree the innocent shouldn’t be put to death.”

Today, 40-year-old Brandon Bernard is scheduled to be executed for a crime he was involved in at age 18. While Bernard was not the person who pulled the trigger on the two people murdered — that man, Christopher Vialva, was executed in September — he was eligible for capital punishment, which can only be handed down to legal adults.

ON MARCH 13, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an order issuing a moratorium on the state’s death penalty—providing a reprieve from execution for 737 people on death row. Newsom cited as reasons that the ultimate penalty provides no public safety benefit and has no value as a deterrent. As someone who has worked as a public defender inside the criminal justice system for 30 years, I applaud the humanity and compassion of his decision.

While the number of countries that employ the death penalty dwindles, the United States and several others still enforce it. Despite strong empirical evidence to the contrary, we are led to believe capital punishment is reserved for the “worst of the worst” and that it is supported by victims and law enforcement alike. Leaving aside that 156 people on death row nationwide have been exonerated since 1973, the death penalty is discriminatory in its application and in the selection of those whom the state seeks to kill. It is largely sought because of the economic status of the defendant, the race of the victim and the defendant, and where the crime took place, not because of the circumstances of the offense.

What must it be like to survive your own execution?

It happened this week in Ohio. And it’s not the first time.

More than 50 years later, California still lists lethal gas as a legal execution means. So do five other states: Arizona, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Wyoming, although Mississippi and Oklahoma, which use nitrogen hypoxia, don’t use that term. (More on that below). I learned this as I searched on my phone standing in front of John Singer Sargent’s monumental 1919 painting “Gassed,” which is on display in the New-York Historical Society’s exhibition “W​orld War I Beyond the Trenches” (through Sept. 3).

Arkansas carried out back-to-back executions on Monday night, administering lethal injections to two men convicted of rape and murder to become the first U.S. state to put more than one inmate to death on the same day in 17 years. Marcel Williams, 46, was pronounced dead at 10:33 CDT, a little more than three hours after the execution of 52-year-old Jack Jones, according to officials at Cummins Unit prison, about 75 miles southeast of the state capital, Little Rock.

The last time a U.S. state tried to execute two inmates on the same day, a poorly secured intravenous tube popped out, lethal injection chemicals sprayed in the death chamber, and staff said the pressure of dual executions exposed flaws in the protocol. That scenario in 2014 in Oklahoma, where executions are now on hold, has not stopped Arkansas from pursuing an unprecedented plan to put eight inmates to death in back-to-back lethal injections on four days this month.

We march on Jan. 17 because it is the 40th anniversary of the first "modern-era" execution, after our courts ruled in favor of the death penalty following a decade-long moratorium. On that day, Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad in Utah in revenge for his murders of Max Jenson and Ben Bushnell. Since then there have been 1,442 other executions. We will hold 40 signs, one for each year since 1977, with the names of those executed each year. We will also carry roses for the victims — both those who have been murdered and those who have been executed — declaring that violence is the disease … not the cure.

Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, Texas has had 537 executions — that’s over 400 more than any other state. But it has been more than five months since Texas has had an execution — 161 days to be exact. And that’s a record worthy of news. There’s only one other time in the past two decades that the death chamber has been that quiet in Texas.

But what’s happening in Texas reveals something deeper that’s happening all over the country. The death penalty is dying.