Comment: It's time to end the death penalty

Once upon a time there was a burning political problem known as the death penalty. Others have called the death penalty. Entire political careers in the 1980s and 1990s were built or ruined by it. Democrat Michael Dukakis lost the presidency, many experts said in 1988, looking awkward when asked what he would do if a guy murdered his wife. 1992 candidate Bill Clinton learned the lesson. He returned home to the Arkansas Governor's mansion in the middle of the campaign to preside over the execution of a prisoner with mental disorders.

But, like other obsessions of the mix – tape era – such as Biosphere 2, the Y2K bug and Hillary Clinton 's hairstyles – the capital punishment has lost its power over the public. The country's largest death row was closed Wednesday in California with barely a yawn in response.

California Governor Gavin Newsom, D, has announced that he will not continue to execute any of the 737 inmates sentenced to death from the state prison of San Quentin. Calling the death penalty "ineffective, irreversible and immoral", Newsom ordered the decommissioning of the enforcement chamber and rescinded the state's protocol for lethal injection. These measures will make it harder for California's future governors to turn the tide.

The governors of Colorado, Oregon, and Pennsylvania have already renounced the death penalty and suffered no sensible political reaction. With California, these four indefinite breaks cover about one-third of death row inmates in the United States. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has suspended the death penalty in his state, home to 144 more convicts, until a protocol of execution that meets the court's standards can be developed.

Elsewhere, the rulings initially ordered by the governors led to total abolition. Last year, the Supreme Court of Washington State introduced a moratorium in 2014 declaring the death penalty unconstitutional. In Illinois, a governor moratorium became permanent in 2011 when the legislature abolished the death penalty.

What was once political dynamite became as explosive as wet newsprint. In moving away from capital punishment, elected leaders essentially convert death sentences to life sentences without the possibility of parole – for the same reason that Newsom was able to reduce the California high-speed train earlier this year. year. The public is wise to make expensive gestures that produce lean results.

For nearly half a century, the United States Supreme Court has ruled several times that the death penalty is different from all other sentences. To be legal, it must meet strict standards. This perfectionism, of course on paper, has proved impossible to reliably and effectively satisfy in the lower courts.

The moratorium of Newsom comes 13 years after the last execution in California. In 2006, the state ended the life of a triple murderer whose appeals had been heard by the courts for nearly 25 years. Since then, nothing. Just expectations and endless litigation, with a price that, according to experts, is in the billions.

Nationally, less than 1% of those sentenced to death were executed in 2018. A death row in 2016 (the most recent year for which data are available) was almost as likely to die natural causes that the execution. This is not surprising, given that the median age of those sentenced to death was approaching 50 years.

These realities – high costs and scarce results – first changed the policy of the death penalty at the local level 20 years ago. Elected prosecutors, seeing their budgets decimated by the expenses of capital suits and appeals, have stopped demanding the death penalty. Between 1981 and 2000, US courts imposed more than 200 death sentences per year, sometimes more than 300. But their numbers have fallen sharply and have not exceeded 50 convictions per year since 2014.

Meanwhile, police officials came to the same realization. A 2008 survey of 500 police chiefs and commissioned by the Death Penalty Information Center found that capital punishment was one of the most popular crime prevention strategies.

It is in this context that so many governors felt safe to be healthy in spirit. State by state, they put an end to this useless madness. State legislators are moving in the same direction. From New Hampshire to Wyoming, lawmakers are pushing through legislation to end the death penalty – often led by conservatives.

Sooner or later, this radical change will probably be part of the institution that gave us this mess. In 1972, the Supreme Court examined a country in which hundreds of prisoners had fallen on death row and virtually none had been executed. The court overturned this arbitrary system and for four years there was no death penalty in the United States. But states have promised that a more elaborate system would yield reliable results.

Well, the results of this experiment are known. After more than four decades of retouching the system, capital punishment is an expensive sham justice. Which was unconstitutional in 1972 the rest today. The high court should cancel everything.

David Von Drehle is the author of four books, including "Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and the most perilous American year" and "Triangle: the fire that has transformed America."