According to the Pew Research Center, nationwide support for the death penalty is at a 40-year low. Twenty years ago, 71 percent of Democrats and 87 percent of Republicans were in favor of capital punishment. Now, just 40 percent of Democrats and 77 percent of Republicans are in favor.
Despite dwindling support for the death penalty, three states were able to expand capital punishment this year.
In California, voters passed Proposition 66, which speeds up the death row process. Technically, Prop. 66 “passed” by such a narrow margin (50.9 percent to 49.1 percent) that the vote is too close to call at this point. But it’s highly unlikely that provisional and mail-in ballots will be enough to make up the 152,000 vote deficit, so you can go ahead and chalk this up as a win for the death team.
Oddly enough, Californians also voted on a measure that would have abolished the death penalty this year – that one lost by a margin of 8 percent, though. No need to wait for the mail-ins there.
Last year, the Nebraska state legislature passed LB 268, banning the death penalty. Gov. Pete Ricketts, a Republican, tried to veto the law; his veto was overridden. Ricketts was born into wealth (his dad founded the über-successful online broker TD Ameritrade) and he personally donated $300,000 in support of this election’s Referendum 426, which gave voters a chance to repeal LB 268 if they wanted.
A full 61.2 percent of voters chose to repeal LB 268. The death penalty is legal again in Nebraska.
Finally, in Oklahoma, 66.4 percent of voters approved State Question 776. This amended the state constitution to clarify that capital punishment doesn’t count as “cruel and unusual punishment.”
There are myriad reasons why the death penalty should be abolished. Like many tools of the law enforcement industry, it disproportionately affects people of color. Also, there’s always the chance that a person is innocent of the crime that put them on death row.
The justice system isn’t perfect, so why make punishment permanent?
According to the Innocence Project, there have been 20 cases of death row inmates being exonerated by DNA evidence.
Then there’s the simple moral logic of, you know, killing is bad. The state should not be allowed to decide who gets to live and who gets to die. As the Wu-Tang Clan put it in “Da Mystery of Chessboxin:”
“Homicide’s illegal and death is the penalty. / What justifies the homicide, when he dies?”
Hopefully, nationwide support for the death penalty will continue to fall, and these three state laws are just aberrations, rather than a sign of things to come.
Watch this clip for more information about how this affects California:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4BX1C_1ieY&ab_channel=WochitNews
Featured Image: Screenshot Via YouTube Video.
