The Slow Death of the Death Penalty

Why the death penalty is in decline across the United States

Across the country, the death penalty is dying. Twenty-two states have abandoned state-sanctioned executions, including nine in the last fifteen years. Of the twenty-eight states that still have the death penalty, eight have not had an execution in over a decade. And public support for the death penalty has declined from 80% of the surveyed population in the early 1990s to approximately 50% today.

As the death penalty slowly withers away, Todd C. Peppers, Jamie Almallen, and Mary Welek Atwell bring together a number of distinguished death-penalty scholars, activists, and attorneys to take an accounting of the damage inflicted by the machinery of death. Contributors to the book point to a range of different pathologies which have caused politicians and voters to turn against capital punishment, from unacceptable rates of false convictions and racially motivated prosecutions, to a clemency process poisoned by political factors.

Essay topics include various dimensions of the death penalty, including racial and gender bias; economic costs; the conviction of juveniles, the mentally ill, and the factually innocent; Supreme Court decisions; and the failure of the death penalty to serve as a deterrent against crime. This important volume is an up-to-date accounting of the current state and, as the contributors argue, the future demise of the death penalty.

Todd C. Peppers is Professor of Public Affairs at Roanoke College. He is the author and editor of many books, including Of Courtiers and Princes: Stories of Lower Court Clerks and Their Judges and In Chambers: Stories of Supreme Court Law Clerks and Their Justices.Almallen Jamie :

Jamie Almallen is an Assistant Public Defender at the Richmond Public Defender's Office.Atwell Mary Welek :

Mary Welek Atwell is Professor Emeritus of Criminal Justice at Radford University. She is the author of Wretched Sisters: Gender and Capital Punishment, Equal Protection of the Law? Gender and Justice in the United States, and Evolving Standards of Decency: Popular Culture and Capital Punishment. Todd C. Peppers (Editor)
Todd C. Peppers is Professor of Public Affairs at Roanoke College. He is the author and editor of many books, including Of Courtiers and Princes: Stories of Lower Court Clerks and Their Judges and In Chambers: Stories of Supreme Court Law Clerks and Their Justices.

Jamie Almallen (Editor)
Jamie Almallen is an Assistant Public Defender at the Richmond Public Defender's Office.

Mary Welek Atwell (Editor)
Mary Welek Atwell is Professor Emeritus of Criminal Justice at Radford University. She is the author of Wretched Sisters: Gender and Capital Punishment, Equal Protection of the Law? Gender and Justice in the United States, and Evolving Standards of Decency: Popular Culture and Capital Punishment.

The Slow Death of the Death Penalty is a timely and eloquent book that helps us understand the decline of the death penalty in the last few decades. It is an essential source for scholars of the death penalty and a post mortem that will be remembered as a bellwether in legal studies.

Those who favor the death penalty frequently cite tired theoretical tropes to condone its
use—that the killer will never kill again, that executing them permanently removes them from
society, or that executing them is cheaper and more efficient than ‘three hots and a cot’ in prison for life. These essays, however—written by some of America’s most renowned death penalty scholars—rip the lid off these theories to expose the true rotting underbelly of America’s death sentencing. The arbitrariness of those selected to die, the racial and gender inequalities, the bloated cost and wasteful bureaucracies, the pervasive law enforcement and prosecutorial corruption, and the absolute lack of deterrence are on full, bloody display. Whether for the death penalty or against, this book is a must read.

As the American death penalty has faded from our courtrooms, this highly readable and compelling volume collects the perspectives of frontline visionaries, scholars, and lawyers, conducting an autopsy of the penalty itself.