On his book End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice
Cover Interview of October 08, 2017
In a nutshell
End of its Rope explores why the death penalty in America
unexpectedly faded away.
Twenty years ago, death sentencing was at its modern height.
Across the Southern “death belt,” death sentences and executions were common. The
death penalty was popular, as opinion polls showed, and politicians understood
well.
Suddenly, this cycle of punishment began to slow down. The story
of this great decline of death penalties in America teaches important lessons
for all involved in the effort to reduce mass incarceration.
In 2016, just thirty-one people were sentenced to death in
the entire country. If you look back at the mid-1990s, by way of contrast,
several hundred people were sentenced to death in as many as two hundred
counties per year. Executions are fading fast too. Only twenty people were
executed in 2016.
In this book, I explain what changed. I draw on death
penalty trials across the country, from high-profile cases like the Aurora,
Colorado theater shooting trial, to small-town trials in Virginia and North
Carolina that only made local news.
Increasingly, juries are rejecting the death penalty, even
in cases of serious murders. Increasingly, they are hearing mental health
evidence and background evidence that causes them to vote for mercy for
convicted murderers. Those decisions have changed the shape of the American
death penalty and represent a sea change in our attitudes towards criminal
punishment.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
End of its Rope explores why the death penalty in America unexpectedly faded away.
Twenty years ago, death sentencing was at its modern height. Across the Southern “death belt,” death sentences and executions were common. The death penalty was popular, as opinion polls showed, and politicians understood well.
Suddenly, this cycle of punishment began to slow down. The story of this great decline of death penalties in America teaches important lessons for all involved in the effort to reduce mass incarceration.
In 2016, just thirty-one people were sentenced to death in the entire country. If you look back at the mid-1990s, by way of contrast, several hundred people were sentenced to death in as many as two hundred counties per year. Executions are fading fast too. Only twenty people were executed in 2016.
In this book, I explain what changed. I draw on death penalty trials across the country, from high-profile cases like the Aurora, Colorado theater shooting trial, to small-town trials in Virginia and North Carolina that only made local news.
Increasingly, juries are rejecting the death penalty, even in cases of serious murders. Increasingly, they are hearing mental health evidence and background evidence that causes them to vote for mercy for convicted murderers. Those decisions have changed the shape of the American death penalty and represent a sea change in our attitudes towards criminal punishment.