US: The decline of the death penalty

Executions have fallen by half since 1999. The number of new death sentences is about one-third what it was at the 1996 peak. Even in Texas, long the leading practitioner, death sentences are off by 80 percent. Several states that retain capital punishment have not administered a single lethal injection in the past five years.

The exoneration of 138 death row inmates has weakened public support for the ultimate sanction. In a recent Gallup poll, 64 percent of Americans endorsed it, down from 80 percent in 1994, while opposition has nearly doubled.

A survey commissioned by the Death Penalty Information Center found that 61 percent prefer that murderers get some sort of life sentence instead. As a budget priority, the death penalty was ranked seventh out of seven issues.

Read the editorial at the Chicago Tribune
Also read John Duty: human guinea pig in Oklahoma's cruel experiment

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John Duty: human guinea pig in Oklahoma's cruel experiment

It is ironic that sodium thiopental was abandoned by veterinarians on both sides of the Atlantic some years ago, as it was consider unreliable, the side effects unacceptably painful. So, we currently kill people with drugs we would not use on animals.

Perhaps this gave the Oklahoma authorities an idea: the condemned prisoners are, in populist parlance, no better than animals. Rather than look for more sodium thiopental, Oklahoma has chosen to turn to the vets for help. They have asked the court for permission to execute John Duty on 16 December – just in time for Christmas – with phenobarbitol, the drug the vets currently use to kill dogs. This is, they suggest, a kindness. Unfortunately, they have found a judge in Oklahoma to agree with them.

Read the editorial from the Guardian

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