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At 9:48 pm On Thursday, Jose Jimenez became the 25th person to be executed in the United States in 2018.
Jimenez was convicted of a murder in 1992; its execution was originally scheduled for August, but the Florida Supreme Court issued a stay that was later lifted.
Jimenez's lethal injection comes at a time when a new report describes a continuing decline in capital punishment
The Death Penalty Information Center released its annual report on Friday. Over the past two years, executions have increased slightly, but the report says that a closer look at the data reveals "continued erosion of the death penalty in the country".
"This is a generational minimum sustained," said Robert Dunham, executive director of the center, criticized the mode of enforcement of the death penalty. "The last four combined years will have exactly half as many death sentences as the previous four years." . The report predicts that 42 people will be sentenced to death in 2018.
Public opposition to the death penalty has increased in recent decades. A Gallup poll in October showed that 41% of Americans opposed the death penalty for someone convicted of murder, its highest level for nearly half a century. Polls published in June by the Pew Research Center show a slight increase in support for the death penalty over the last two years, but confirm this downward trend.
punishment is legal in 30 states, the majority of them do not carry out executions . According to the report released on Friday, only eight states – Texas, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Nebraska, Ohio and South Dakota – have killed prisoners this year . In October, Washington became the last state to ban the death penalty after its Supreme Court ruled that it had been imposed arbitrarily and with racial prejudice.
In an interview with NPR, Elisabeth Semel, director of the death penalty clinic at Berkeley Law School, said that despite the fact that executions are slightly up from the minimum recorded in 2016 for 25 years, "there is no doubt that it is a dramatic downward trend." Semel said that Americans' support for the death penalty had cooled since his fervor in the "crime suppression" mentality of the 1980s and 90s.
"I think that there has been a reassessment, just like a reassessment regarding mass incarceration, "Semel said. "Politicians have become less pressing than before."
The Gallup poll shows that 45% of Americans think that the death penalty is generally unfairly applied.
Experts seeking to explain this trend also denounce the exemptions. death row inmates, botched executions and more and more Conservative objections to the death penalty. In August, Pope Francis approved a revision of Catholic teachings, calling the death penalty "inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person".
As reported by the NPR, states also struggled to obtain some of the drugs used for lethal injections, by far the most common mode of delivery. The stocks have expired and the pharmaceutical companies have opposed the use of their products in the procedure. Critics have decried the tedious executions that can be caused by lethal injections. In November, a Tennessee detainee was executed in an electric chair after his lawyers felt that the lethal injection would be a longer and more painful process.
According to the report released Friday, there would have been about one death offender's exoneration for nine executions. . In 2018, three prisoners awaiting execution saw their sentences reduced to life imprisonment; two prisoners, Vicente Benavides and Clemente Aguirre-Jarquin, were exonerated.
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