America’s Changing Death Penalty Debate

Americans are souring on the death penalty for lots of different reasons.

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A lethal injection gurney is shown before being dismantled in March 2019 at California's San Quentin State Prison. (Photo by California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation via Getty Images)

Ron McAndrew’s third execution was the last he would ever oversee.

On March 25, 1997, McAndrew, then the warden of the Florida State Prison in Raiford, watched as guards escorted Pedro Medina into the death chamber at the prison and strapped him into “Old Sparky,” the electric chair that had been in use since 1923. Medina had been convicted of the gruesome 1982 murder of Dorothy James, a 51-year-old elementary school teacher. “I am still innocent,” Medina said when asked for his last words. Guards strapped his limbs into the chair, placed a saline-soaked sponge atop Medina’s head, then latched an electrode on top of the sponge, followed by a copper helmet, and finally a mask over his face.

At a secret signal from McAndrew, the executioner flipped on the electrical current and Medina’s body jerked back as the fatal charge entered his body. Then it all went wrong.

The sponge—which had been wrung too dry of the saline solution that should have conducted the electrical current into Medina’s head—caught fire. Blue and orange flames shot out from Medina’s masked head. Smoke filled the execution chamber. So did the smell of burning flesh.

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  1. Gbm311

    There is abundant opportunity for reform without completely abandoning the death penalty. The criteria for execution clearly needs to be tightened up. Most people will agree that there are individuals whose acts were so heinous and the evidence so overwhelming - think Timothy McVeigh and Dylan Roof - that they should die. The issue of being unable to find a vein is laughable when the interosseous route, now used routinely in ERs around the country, is always an option. We need a national commission on this issue. Prison reform is long overdue and the absurd delay in processing these cases in our courts is a solvable problem.

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  2. Helbock

    I would like to see the death penalty ended but ONLY when "life without parole" means the convict leaves prison in a box or does not EVER leave.

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    Ben Connelly

    “ “Some murders are so heinous, their perpetrators so wicked, that society has no choice but to seek the death penalty—and a majority of Americans agree,” Cotton told The Dispatch in a written statement. “Arguments against capital punishment happen in a vacuum, far removed from the heartbreaking details of any one particular case. But those arguments collapse under the acute weight of reality. To win the death penalty debate, we must point to the grisly, awful reality that necessitates its existence.””

    Cotton is right. Other than squeamishness about violence, why is life in prison more compassionate than death? I would take death ten times out of ten if given the choice between death and life in prison. Imprisoning an innocent person for life is just as morally abhorrent as killing him or her. There should be a separate argument about what is and isn’t admissible evidence in court (no more forensic pseudoscience like bite marks) and how we perhaps might need a higher burden of proof for imprisoning people if so many innocent people are being wrongly convicted, but that should be a separate question from whether death is or isn’t an acceptable punishment.

    It may be less “clean” but a bullet to the head is a more effective and often less painful method than lethal injection or the electric chair. There is less that can go wrong. If that’s too gruesome, I’m sure we can devise some cleaner method that is quicker and more effective and relatively painless.

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    1. Alex G

      “ Other than squeamishness about violence, why is life in prison more compassionate than death?”

      Death is irreversible. A wrongly convicted person can be released from confinement. The grave is another story.

      “ I would take death ten times out of ten if given the choice between death and life in prison.”

      The convicted do not choose their sentences, and it makes perfect sense to ignore their preferences. Their sentences are meted out by a system of justice and a codified set of rules, not their personal convenience.

      “ Imprisoning an innocent person for life is just as morally abhorrent as killing him or her.”

      How so? Again, should it be determined that a given convict was wrongfully convicted, he can be released from confinement. Death is permanent. Death also requires an otherwise uninvolved person to physically kill another human. Why force this upon our civil servants?

      “ It may be less “clean” but a bullet to the head is a more effective and often less painful method than lethal injection or the electric chair. There is less that can go wrong.”

      People survive gunshot wounds in the head, sometimes. People also yank shots and miss. Guns and ammunition sometimes malfunction and perform out of specification. And again, someone innocent has to do the actual killing. The impact on the clerical killer should not be discounted.

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      1. Just this guy

        > Death is irreversible.

        So is imprisonment. Nothing can ever restore lost time and opportunity.

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        Ben Connelly

        All fair points. Whether we keep the death penalty or not we must do a better job of keeping innocent people from being wrongly convicted.

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        1. Alex G

          That is certainly the case. Wrongful conviction is a serious and intolerable injustice, no doubt.

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    Sir. Orc

    It is funny that Medina was mentioned as I found this article that mentioned his case when looking for opinions in support of the death penalty: https://www.atlassociety.org/post/the-moral-argument-for-the-death-penalty

    The article does not mention that Medina befriended the woman he killed - an elderly former schoolteacher and mother of two - then brutally and repeatedly stabbing her to death over the course of half an hour before stealing her car. A car he was found sleeping in by police after trying to fence it. His hat was also left at the scene which fit when he tried it on at trial.

    Funny none of that got mentioned.

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      Thomas Grimmer

      Why is it funny? Discussions about the death penalty don't require specific descriptions of capital crimes.

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        Sir. Orc

        Perhaps, but if you ignore the specifics of the crime - and more importantly, the evidence of the condemned’s guilt - then you are not having an honest discussion of the matter. When you omit these details but devote plenty of space to sympathetic coverage of the condemned and the moral throes of one particular warden, you are engaging in straight up emotional manipulation. You are not engaging in the whole of the facts nor making a reasoned judgment.

        You are not, in short, being honest.
        After all that has happened, I have very little patience for dishonesty, both overt and by omission. I expect better from the Dispatch.

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          Thomas Grimmer

          If you focus on the gory details of a specific crime, you're probably engaged in your own form of emotional manipulation. And you haven't made a case that the death penalty is appropriate, in general or particular. You're just pointing a depraved and horrible act/person and saying "look! a horrible and depraved act/person!"

          Your link tries to make this argument via emotional manipulation that you so decry. And it fails by begging the question that justice must condone the death penalty for murder. Justice *must* do no such thing. The author argues that all crimes must be punished in proportion according to the harm they impose, but *only in the case of the death penalty,* because he argues that " law need not literally demand an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." Well, pick one. Because here's the thing: we always will have to decide what crimes are punishable by death, and that will always range from none to all of them. So you need a better argument.

          Let's say you have a guy who defrauded a huge number of people out of tens of billions of dollars. Let's call this hypothetical person Maddie Bernov. I would argue that the harm caused by this person is both incalculable, and worse than the murder of one person. Now how can you punish Maddie "proportional to the harm he did?" Well... you can't. He won the criminal lottery! But guess what? I think Maddie, if he ever existed, caused more harm, more years of life and health lost, more mental anguish, more moments of grief and doubt, than the murder of one random person. Now that's an ethical weighing of the feather of justice on my part, but I don't think I'm wrong. And yet who will argue that Maddie should fry?

          As for evidence, well, I would hope that all punishments meet appropriate evidentiary burdens, whether a simple speeding ticket, or a capital murder.

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  5. Trichwages

    I’ll keep reading but…this stood out right away and, while the dates don’t exactly line up, if “from 1972 until the end of 2020, shows 244 sentences of death issued” and “In 2002 Ray Krone became the 100th death row inmate exonerated since the Supreme Court ruled executions were constitutional in 1976 after the four-year halt imposed by the Court’s decision in Furman v. Georgia” — then the death penalty is a judicial and moral failure as a policy matter full stop. 100 exonerations out of 244 is not rare and infrequent but pervasive and unjust (and bear in mind that those 100 only included successful outcomes and not those that aren’t even adjudicated for technical/procedural reasons—even when there is new evidence or a confession by another person).

    Don’t get me started on the “inconvenient length of time to fully adjudicate the rights granted citizens under the law** and the constitution” or “the high cost” arguments — the first should be irrelevant when it comes to the state killing one of its citizens and the second is a fact related to the policy being insisted on.

    **now limited by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, wherein habeas corpus was limited for all criminal cases, not just death penalty, and also created new statutory law. Was supposed to just make sure the state was able to swiftly kill Timothy McVey for OK City without having to deal with those pesky constitutional rights, but managed to get amended to cover all crimes. Sickening all the way around, IMO, even for Timothy McVey. Bloodlust and revenge are not good foundations for law or justice.

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      Pat @ Tavi Hall

      They may have gone back and edited since you posted but that sentence now reads, "The DPIC’s Death Penalty Census, a database released in 2022 tracking all death sentences from 1972 until the end of 2020, shows 244 sentences of death issued in 2000. By 2010 the number dropped to 127, and by 2022 it had dropped to 20."

      244 sentences was for one year not the whole time period, the 100 number is for the whole time period. You'd have to learn how many over the time period were sentenced to compare these two numbers.

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      1. Trichwages

        Appreciate the additional info/clarification - thanks. From a moral standpoint, I doubt it will change how I “feel” overall but it is important not to cherry pick or ignore facts that do not support or are inconvenient to my declarative statements :-)

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    Jeff Walden

    I don't have strong feelings on the existence of the death penalty. If it goes away, I won't shed a tear.

    But if it goes away, I would strongly prefer it go away on the basis of *real* information, than false. Not going away because of absurd ideas that the Constitution forbids it (when in fact its plain text sanctions being "deprived of life" as punishment for crime). And not going away, on the basis of edge cases, even for cases where there is no conceivable dispute (such as the aforementioned Charleston church shooter).

    Crimes already have to be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. (Setting aside plea bargains, tho I doubt many of those end in the death penalty!) Smart death penalty advocates would do well to tighten up the *evidentiary* standards for it as a punishment to reduce the risk of misapplication. There's no reason that the standard of proof for a crime, has to be identical to the standard of evidence that permits application of the death penalty. Require DNA evidence as prerequisite. Require multiple eyewitnesses, to whatever number is deemed appropriate. Require apprehension at scene of the crime in question.

    There are plenty of evidentiary safeguards that *could* be instituted that would go a long way to knock the foundations out of most anti-death penalty objections. Some would have the benefit of finding actual innocence of some of the wrongfully accused -- and so the *actual* criminals would be more likely to be found. If you want to shore up support for the death penalty, make it more accurate. And politically, calls for greater accuracy in our judicial system will be hard for the most vocal abolitionists to oppose -- because who could oppose greater accuracy.

    But right now, all it seems to me is death penalty supporters are dug in and refuse to consider any ways at all that the system could be improved, without giving up the policy. In the long run, that's a recipe for losing the policy entirely.

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    Dina

    Although I hate for mass killers to avoid the death penalty, I nevertheless oppose it. Our current system is unjust. Too many innocent people have been exonerated, sometimes at the last minute. I would rather ten heinous criminals stay alive than one innocent man be put to death.

    The fact that the poor and minorities are far more likely to receive the death penalty should give us pause.

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  8. Ksengstock

    A fantastic report on the death penalty. This is what good journalism looks like. Well done, Mr. Willour.

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    Mattjabour

    If we're going to keep the death penalty, we should at least be honest about it. It's revenge killing, plain and simple. Not self defense, not a way to make sure the criminal never kills again (that's what jail is for), we're killing someone as revenge for them killing someone else. Some people are cool with that. I feel like maybe we shouldn't be. By hook or by crook, it's still the guillotine.

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      Jeff Walden

      Jail is not a *guaranteed* way to make sure the criminal never kills again. The death penalty is. The death penalty is final in a way that jail, from which someone can escape, which might not prevent another murder (either in jail, or outside of it in case of escape), is not.

      It is simply false to equate the effects of jail with the (non-death-related) effects of the death penalty.

      I don't have particular feelings on the death penalty, myself. Its existence should be on the table, when discussing policy. But we shouldn't be deciding on the basis of plainly false claims that jail provides every protective benefit that the death penalty does.

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    Jak41592

    In principle I can see the argument for the death penalty. If a person is too dangerous to allow walking society and the only way to defend society is to end that person's life, then the death penalty is just. But in a modern society what's the point? I can envision few scenarios where it makes sense, and barring a national calamity I oppose it. On cost grounds alone just lock the person up for the remainder of their existence.

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