The Death Penalty in the USA: At the End

Boston’s inhabitants are proud that in the end the jurors have given the death penalty, even though executing people doesn’t match the liberal attitude of the city. It’s true that in colonial times the state of Massachusetts was among the first to hang a criminal, but in 1984 the death penalty was declared unconstitutional, and the large majority of people in the Northeast of the United States haven’t missed it.

This conviction is so established that even terrorism has not shaken it. When on April 15, 2013 the presumed terrorists, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Zarnajev, set off their bombs on the Boston Marathon route, the city stood still in shock. But it did not yearn for revenge. According to a recent poll, only 15 percent of inhabitants want the accused Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to be executed, although he showed little remorse during the proceedings.

For the jury in Boston, only citizens who did not oppose execution were selected. The death sentence against Tsarnaev, 21, imposed last Friday from a jury of 12 people triggered apprehension. Many declared that executing one so young was incompatible with the spirit of the city. The verdict was only possible because the terrorism process is not subject to local law, but rather federal law, which declares the death penalty permissible.

But for several reasons the case of Tsarnaev is misleading, as quite a lot of circumstantial evidence indicates that the death penalty in America is gradually fading away. Fewer and fewer death sentences are imposed and carried out. Since the turn of the millennium, the number of death sentences has decreased by two-thirds, and the number of executions by half. However, 56 percent of citizens still feel that death is an acceptable punishment for convicted murderers, as the Pew Institute recently discovered. No less than 60 percent of people nationwide wish for the presumed bomber Tsarnaev’s death. But the trend is clear. According to Pew, 78 percent of the population in the ’90s were still in favor of executing a murderer. At the time, only 18 percent spoke out clearly against it; today that figure is 38 percent.

In Tsarnaev’s case, the jury was not a reflection of the population — not of the locals, nor other Americans. Only citizens who explicitly did not already have a fundamental objection to execution were eligible jurors. The court wanted to provide an open-ended process, but the proceedings revealed that the idea of a maximum penalty is still complicated in sensational cases. While the assumed culprit showed no remorse, the district attorney described him as a coldblooded murderer, who justified his offense with ideology and even reveled in the destruction. In such a case, the jury members may have felt that life imprisonment alone was not enough.

But death penalty expert and law professor Austin Sarat now indicates that Tsarnaev’s case is unusual. None of the factors which lead to reservations about the death penalty plays a role in the Boston proceedings. First, the evidence was so overwhelming, that there was no doubt he committed the offense. Second, Tsarnaev stood at the side of a reliable defense lawyer, so that he could defend himself against the allegations with adequate resources. Third, this proceeding is not under the suspicions of racism. The accused wasn’t part of the group of poor, often dark-skinned men, who make up a predominant number of death row inmates.

It is unclear what has damaged the death sentence more — a new sense of fairness among the population, or rather an increasing awareness of the errors, ignorance and incompetence of those who decide on executions and carry them out. Often sloppiness or bias is discovered, or the suspect is not well-defended. This occurs not only in the American Southern states, where Alabama in particular has a bad reputation, but recently even the U.S. federal police, the FBI, have had to acknowledge that for decades, they had charged suspects using imperfect hair analysis. Although forensics has strongly improved, mainly on account of genetic analysis, it is still not possible to convict every offender beyond the shadow of a doubt.

In the meantime, there are still larger challenges, such as buying the poison to kill the convicts. Large pharmaceutical companies refuse to deliver the deadly chemical. But even when lethal injections are administered, terrible scenes can occur, as happened in Oklahoma last year. After being administered an unauthorized poison mixture, the murderer Clayton Lockett fought with death for 45 minutes, talked, twitched and finally died from a heart attack.

Last Year Only 20 Federal States Imposed the Death Sentence

Recently the Supreme Court, the highest law in the USA, has been part of a lawsuit filed by three death row inmates from Oklahoma. From their view, the common anesthetic is unsuited for executions, because it does not lead to unconsciousness quickly or reliably enough. Therefore, the use of this chemical violates the law against cruel and unusual punishment, which is stated in the U.S. Constitution. The left-wing judge Stephen Breyer called the principle of the death penalty into question at the hearing, as no method has been found to carry it out without agony. But the hearing showed the conservative judiciary majority reluctant to call the principles of execution into question.

In the USA, the death penalty is still permitted in 32 states, as well as under federal law. But according to the expert Sarat, only 20 of these states in the past year have imposed the death sentence, and eight of them haven’t executed anyone for a decade. The U.S. government itself has not killed any convicts since 2003, and at present they have completely suspended executions in order to examine their own rules and proceedings. Even if the conviction and sentence against Tsarnaev passes in the court of appeal, it is uncertain if he will ever actually be executed for his deed.