To kill or not to kill?

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: NATIONAL - Capital punishment

The number of executions has fallen sharply and more states have gotten rid of capital punishment. Is the death penalty on its way out?

Everyone watching the execution of Clayton Lockett last April knew instantly that something had gone terribly wrong. Lockett was strapped to a gurney in the death chamber of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary and had been given an injection when he started kicking, twitching, and then writhing and moaning in agony.

Lockett, who had been convicted of shooting a 19-year-old woman and burying her alive in 1999, had been sentenced to die by lethal injection, but the untested drug combination of a sedative and paralyzing agent had failed. Thirty minutes later, he died of a heart attack.

"It looked like torture," says Lockett's lawyer, Dean Sanderford.

Then in July, it took Arizona nearly two hours to execute Joseph R. Wood by lethal injection; a reporter counted at least 640 gasps before the convicted murderer finally died.

The botched executions horrified many Americans and breathed new life into the long-running debate about the death penalty: Should the government put people to death? Does the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution allow it? Does the death penalty deter crime? Does it discriminate against minorities? What about the possibility of mistakenly executing innocent people? Conversely, are some crimes so horrific--mass murders or acts of terrorism, for example--that any punishment short of death is simply inadequate?

Opposition to the death penalty in the U.S. is growing: Eighteen states have abolished capital punishment, including New Mexico, Illinois, Connecticut, and Maryland in the past five years. Another 11 states are debating whether to end it. For some, the high cost of carrying out death sentences has been a factor.

The number of annual executions in the U.S. has declined from 98 in 1999 to 39 in 2013, with Texas and Florida accounting for the vast majority.

Even in death penalty states, governors have begun taking matters into their own hands. The governor of Washington State declared in February that no executions would take place while he remained in office, following a similar move by the governor of Oregon in 2011. Last year, Colorado's governor issued an indefinite reprieve in the only case on his watch.

Internationally, 98 countries--including all of Europe except Belarus--have abolished the death penalty. Another 35 countries still have capital punishment on the books but haven't executed anyone in more than 10 years. Even China--which executed an estimated 2,400 people last year, more than any other country--is putting fewer people to death than in previous years.

'Significant Problems'

Sixty-three percent of Americans still back the death penalty, but support has fallen significantly from a high of 80 percent in 1994, according to Gallup.

"The death penalty really is declining and on its way out," says Diann Rust-Tierney of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. "It's inconsistent with basic American values."

But that's not how death penalty supporters see it.

"There are some crimes for which any lesser punishment is not justice," says Kent Scheidegger of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a victims' rights group.

President Obama has long said he supports capital punishment for the most heinous crimes, but after last spring's botched execution in Oklahoma, he called for a national review of how the death penalty is applied.

"We have seen significant problems--racial bias, uneven application of the death penalty ... situations in which there were individuals on death row who later on were discovered to...