The Slow Death of the Death Penalty

Toward a Postmortem

Todd C. Peppers, Jamie Almallen, Mary Welek Atwell

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781479819645
• eBook ISBN: 9781479819669
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sentencing
• Index: Social Sciences

Why the death penalty is in decline across the United States

Across the country, the death penalty is dying. Twenty-two states have abandoned state-sanctioned executions, including nine in the last fifteen years. Of the twenty-eight states that still have the death penalty, eight have not had an execution in over a decade. And public support for the death penalty has declined from 80% of the surveyed population in the early 1990s to approximately 50% today.

As the death penalty slowly withers away, Todd C. Peppers, Jamie Almallen, and Mary Welek Atwell bring together a number of distinguished death-penalty scholars, activists, and attorneys to take an accounting of the damage inflicted by the machinery of death. Contributors to the book point to a range of different pathologies which have caused politicians and voters to turn against capital punishment, from unacceptable rates of false convictions and racially motivated prosecutions, to a clemency process poisoned by political factors.

Essay topics include various dimensions of the death penalty, including racial and gender bias; economic costs; the conviction of juveniles, the mentally ill, and the factually innocent; Supreme Court decisions; and the failure of the death penalty to serve as a deterrent against crime. This important volume is an up-to-date accounting of the current state and, as the contributors argue, the future demise of the death penalty.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: Systemic Issues with the Death Penalty
• Part II: The Condemned and Their Stories
• Part III: Actors and Decision-Makers
• Part IV: Methods of Execution and Rationale
• Acknowledgments
• About the Contributors
• About the Editors
• Index