State government leaders in Georgia and Texas spoke out against the death penalty last week, reflecting a nationwide lack of support for the punishment, according to a study released in late 2004.
Members of Georgia's house and senate called for a moratorium on capital punishment last Tuesday at a news conference, saying they would seek legislation to stop executions until a panel could be created to study the use of capital punishment.
Texas Governor Rick Perry said last week that before the state puts someone to death, the prisoner should be allowed to have a public hearing on his or her request for clemency.
In recent years, federal and state judicial systems have used the death penalty less frequently due to a decrease in public support for the practice, the Death Penalty Information Center reported in December.
Fewer people support the death penalty because of death-row inmates who were exonerated after DNA evidence proved their innocence, the awareness group stated in its report.
In 2003, the sentences of 263 death row inmates were commuted to life imprisonment or completely exonerated, according to the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics. Illinois Governor George Ryan accounted for 155 commutations and four complete pardons, 60 percent of the total abolished sentences.
Initially a supporter of the death penalty when he took office in 1998, Ryan said he changed his stance "because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious, and therefore immoral, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death," the BBC reported in January 2003.
He left office in the same year and was replaced by Democrat Rod Blagojevich, a death penalty proponent.
In May 2004, U.S. support for alternative methods of punishment, such as life imprisonment, was at a high of 46 percent, while 50 percent supported the death penalty, according to a Gallup poll.
Also, a Criminal Justice Legal Foundation statement released in mid-December 2004 claimed a correlation between public opinion and declining use of the death penalty.
Capital punishment sentences decreased from 282 in 1999 to 130 in 2004, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The figure for 2004 was based on the number of sentences given during the first three-quarters of the 2004 judicial year and an amount predicted by the organization for the fourth quarter.
Actual executions decreased from 98 in 1999 to 54 last year, according to the Department of Justice. The average amount of time spent on death row before exoneration or execution is approximately 10 years.
Less public enthusiasm for the death penalty has empowered some anti-capital punishment groups, such as the AU chapter of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, an activist group.
"A coalition has been formed between anti-death penalty movements in the United States" in recent years, said Rachel Good, head of the group and a junior in the School of International Service.
Good said organizations such as the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and the Death Penalty Information Center have increased their effectiveness by pooling their resources, holding meetings and garnering more support from an increasingly skeptical U.S. populace.
"All of those things you see in the news backed by all of those groups approaching legislators and other judicial members are indications of the coalition's success," Good said.
The main goals of these organizations include publicizing findings that the death penalty is not an effective crime deterrent and soliciting lawmakers directly. Members of New York's state legislature considering reinstating the death penalty are among those approached by these organizations.
However, Robert Johnson, an AU professor of justice, law and society, said he is not fully convinced less popular support is causing less practice of capital punishment, as the anti-capital punishment organizations claim.
"The decline in the use of the death penalty rather has more to do with the progression of individual legal cases," he said.
The practice has become less popular, but this trend in public opinion is largely separate from recent judicial and appellate processes, Johnson said.
However, some accuse anti-capital punishment groups, like the Death Penalty Information Center, of skewing public opinion polls.
"When you read the [center's] full report, it shows a very different picture," said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation. Scheidegger said public opinion actually strongly supports the death penalty.
According to Gallup poll of many of who support the life imprisonment for convicted murderers still support the use of capital punishment for the worst offenders. In 2001 Gallup polls found that an average of 21 percent of those who would normally be opposed to capital punishment supported the execution of Oklahoma City federal building bomber Timothy McVeigh.
