Naureen Khan from Al-Jazeera America profiled the state of the death penalty in the United States. She said,
As 2014 draws to a close, the United States will have executed the fewest inmates since 1994 as public views surrounding capital punishment continue to shift and the act of putting prisoners to death becomes more politically and practically difficult.
There were 35 inmates executed this year, in only seven states, with three — Missouri, Texas and Florida — responsible for 80 percent of them, according to the year-end annual report of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit group that focuses on capital punishment. Moreover, the number of death sentences handed down this year, at 72, dipped to a 40-year low.
Khan interviewed me for this piece, and she said,
Increasingly, there is a conservative case to be made for ending the practice, said Marc Hyden, coordinator for Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty, a coalition formed in 2013, calling capital punishment “another broken government program.”
“The death penalty is riddled with systemic failure,” he said. “It is not fiscally responsible — it costs millions more than life without parole — and it does not fit within the philosophy of limited government.”