I was interviewed by Michele Richinick from MSNBC on the Death Penalty Information Center‘s year-end report and the decreasing support for capital punishment. She said,
The United States saw the lowest number of executions in two decades in 2014, a year in which intense focus was placed on several high-profile botched executions and questions were raised about new drug cocktails that were used in lethal injections.
Thirty-five people were executed in 2014, according to a year-end report released Thursday by the Death Penalty Information Center. In 2013, 39 people were executed. And the 72 new death sentences handed down this year marked the lowest level since 1974, according to the report. In 1996, there were 315 death sentences.
She quoted me as saying,
“No matter where you look, you’re going to find more and more failures with the death penalty,” Marc Hyden, advocacy coordinator for Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty, told msnbc Thursday. ”This is not a system that many people want to support when they find out really how broken and really disgusting it can be.”
Michele had previously reported on Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty during the near execution of Scott Panetti. You can read that article here.