An op-ed written by our Charles Koch Institute Communications Fellow, Thomas Johnson, was published by the Seguin Gazette on Sunday. Thomas described in the article how the death penalty seems to be falling out of favor with prosecutors, victims’ families, and conservatives.
He wrote,
According to a recent Pew poll, support for the death penalty has fallen by 7% in a single year and it is now at a forty-year low. From conservatives to prosecutors to victim’s families, capital punishment is becoming so great a boondoggle that many are calling on society to find a better path. Given the death penalty’s many failures, this kind of backlash is to be expected.
Thomas is correct. There is no shortage of death penalty-related shortcomings, which is leading to capital punishment’s decline in many ways. As a result, Thomas concluded,
If conservatives, prosecutors, and police officials have a growing skepticism about the death penalty’s efficacy and many victims’ families don’t feel the process benefits them, then why do some insist on the death penalty? Capital punishment cannot be for the benefit of society because it siphons funds away from other civil services. We cannot streamline the process without condemning ourselves to a system that would knowingly circumvent the Constitutional right to due process and increase the likelihood of executing an innocent person.
Confronted with this evidence, more conservatives are concluding that the death penalty is a wasteful government program that also harms murder victims’ families and imperils innocent lives.