Although 10 people have been executed in the US so far this year, campaigners against the death penalty continue to challenge the practice successfully on multiple fronts. With a supreme court challenge to capital punishment unlikely to succeed in the near future, campaigners are fighting state by state, court by court, and at the bar of an increasingly sceptical public opinion, targeting aspects of trials and of the execution procedures to curtail bit by bit the barbaric practice.
Issues like the constitutionality of the execution of minors or of the mentally incapacitated, evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, of racial prejudice, of the incompetence of counsel, and the prohibitive cost of capital trials all have contributed to rolling back the actual use of the punishment.
Evidence of how many prisoners are wrongly on death row has also alarmed many – a new study from researchers at the University of North Carolina finds that the most likely outcome for a capital case once a death sentence has been imposed is that the defendant’s conviction or sentence will be reversed on appeal (38 per cent). Thirty-two states still allow it although only seven carried out executions last year, and six states abolished it in 2007.
Now difficulties in obtaining the executioners' drug of choice, pentobarbital, from European and US pharmaceutical companies with scruples about its use has led the state of Utah to reintroduce the firing squad when the drug is not available. "A little bit gruesome," Governor Gary Herbert admitted with considerable understatement as he signed the Bill.
Arkansas is likely to follow suit, while Texas has said it has only enough of the drug for two more executions. States that use another drug have stopped executions while they await a supreme court review of its use in executions. Three states – Oklahoma, Ohio and Arizona – recently carried out lethal injections that led to inmates’ physical distress and drawn-out deaths.
The court is also considering whether the practice in Florida of allowing the judge to overrule a jury’s recommendation on the death penalty should be prohibited. It is considering whether to hear two challenges to an Alabama law which has allowed the state’s judges, who are elected, to have unilaterally imposed death sentences 101 times after the jury voted for life.