The 2015 numbers are in, and the trend is clear: The death penalty is dying.
In North Carolina, juries did not impose a single new death sentence this year. It was the second year since 2012 that no one was sent to death row.
We also neared a decade without an execution. The last man was executed at Central Prison in 2006.
Across the country, the death penalty reached its lowest point in the modern era:
- Across the country, only 49 defendants were sent to death row, the lowest number since the modern death penalty system began in the mid-1970s.
- There were 28 executions in just six states in 2015, the smallest number of executions in nearly 25 years.
- The share of Americans who oppose the death penalty reached its highest level since 1972, shortly before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the death penalty and forced the states to write new death penalty statutes.
Of the executions that were carried out, many were terribly botched as states dealt with a shortage of execution drugs by using untested drug cocktails. Among those who were executed were a severely mentally ill combat veteran, a woman who did not commit the actual crime, and a man who still had troubling claims of innocence — not exactly the “worst of the worst.”
Meanwhile, six more death row inmates were exonerated this year. In North Carolina, Henry McCollum received a pardon of innocence from the governor and compensation for the 30 years he spent wrongfully imprisoned on death row.
In light of the serious errors we have seen, not to mention documented racial bias in the capital system, people simply don’t have the stomach for the death penalty anymore. Prosecutors are seeking it more and more rarely, and juries are reticent to vote for it.
Gretchen Engel, executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, summed it up:
“We have undergone a real evolution as a society. We used to have blind faith in the capital punishment system. Today, we see that the system can get it wrong — badly wrong.”
Despite our change of heart, North Carolina’s death row population remains among the largest in the country with 147 inmates. The vast majority were sentenced in the 1990s, before important reforms that are now considered essential to fair trials.
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