As Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch pushes for execution dates for a pair of death row inmates, most of the country is moving away from capital punishment over concerns about its fairness.
A Gallup poll in October found that 50% of American now believe that capital punishment is applied unfairly, a couple of points higher than those who think it’s fairly applied. According to the Associated Press, that’s the highest disapproval rating for capital punishment in the U.S. since the polling organization began asking about the death penalty’s fairness in 2000.
The decline in public support reflects concerns that Blacks and other minority groups are more likely to be sentenced to death than whites for the same offenses. It also is a reaction to the steady stream of cases in which individuals on death row have been later found to be innocent of the charges to which they were convicted. According to the Washington, D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center, there have been nearly 200 death-row exonerations since 1975, including three this year.
That nonprofit center also says that 29 states now have either abolished the death penalty or have paused executions. A professor at the University of Richmond School of Law told the AP that she believes the number could rise to 40.
It’s a pretty good bet, though, that Mississippi would be one of the holdouts. As a heavily conservative state, the death penalty has more support here than it does in many other parts of the country. That’s why those who have served as attorney general in Mississippi, both Republican and Democrat, have not been shy about pushing for executions, which usually take place, when they do occur, decades after the crime because of the many avenues for appeal.
It’s certainly understandable why many in this state are still in support of the death penalty. The crimes that draw the death sentence are usually some of the most heinous offenses. Those who kill others without justification don’t command a lot of public sympathy.
Yet, there is a way to protect society from the most depraved among us without executing them: Lock them up for life without parole. When you add up what it costs to run through all the appeals of a death-penalty case, it may be cheaper to be satisfied with life imprisonment.
Also, life imprisonment does provide some comfort for the chance that the police, the prosecution and the jury got it wrong. It’s not paradise for the wrongly convicted to spend years or decades behind bars, but at least they have the hope that they might walk free one day. There’s no way for society to redeem itself if it executes the wrong individual.
