General Background
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As mentioned before, the death penalty has gone through lots of changes over time.
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During the 1970’s in particular, capital punishment became a penalty only for accounts of murder and triable as such. Thus, much of our data deals with accounts of murder-based capital punishment and highlights the disparity between races present on death row, along with the pros and cons of the system.
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Even despite all the adjustments and changes made to the legal ruling, we still are noticing a trend of states and legislators moving away from utilization all together...
Screenshot of Wikipedia archive of court cases surrounding the policies of the death penalty. For contextualization purposes - displaying how many attempts were made to make the death penalty more viable/constitutional with each amendment iteration.
Where did we start?
Screenshot of the DPIC's website. The webpage is their execution database, which our group utilized for research.
To get started on figuring out why so many states might be discouraged from continuing to use the death penalty, we began searching online for credible sources providing discourse around the death penalty. Discussions are not new and have been ongoing in mainstream media even for a few years now - there would be plenty of sources to choose from, just a matter of which ones would help tell the story best.
The main source of execution data we worked with stems from the “Death Penalty Information Center”. This is an independent organization headed by experts on the death penalty in which helped us explore and identify ethnographic disparities - the database they have made publicly available contains detailed ethnographic information for the last few decades on individuals admitted into death row through murder charges.
However, upon further exploration of the DPIC website beyond just the dataset, we quickly came to realize that there were many more issues being presented by the death penalty than simply just racial inequities.
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Robert Dunham is the head chair of the DPIC and is considered one of the nation's most recognized legal experts on the death penalty, having made several appearances on mainstream news media outlets to talk about the problematic policies surrounding it. He's pictured here delivering his testimony for HB 445, a call to repeal the death penalty in New Hampshire. Dunham's deliverance of findings and statistics regarding the misgivings of the death penalty generally formulate much of the bedrock for states moving away from the ruling.
Screenshot of a YouTube video - recording of Robert Dunham delivering his testimony at the HB 455 hearing
Excerpt from Robert Dunham's written HB 455 testimony
A key facet Dunham introduces into his testimony were issues that people may not have previously been aware of. For instance, how efficacy is measured for the death penalty. The clear narrative and motion going forward is to eventually step away from a justice system utilizing such punitive methods - empirical arguments against seemingly prove to be moot due to statistical evidence being gathered by state justice departments and other agencies on inmates and well as those admitted to death row. Ultimately, we can see how confusing and inefficient the death penalty is at accomplishing what it wants. While life and death may be a simple concept, having to go through the bureaucracy behind killing someone the justice system thinks "deserves it" may not be worth it in the end.
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The issues Dunham presented in this testimony allowed us to realize the full scope of death penalty issues and implications. From here we began expanding our exploration - in the following sections you will see what we were able to determine after conducting our own independent research into these various problems.
Bureacracy: How does the Sentencing Work?
Generally speaking, the organization of what goes through a decision to order the death penalty is the following:
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Individual commits crime, is tried and prosecuted
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Federally, final decision to issue death penalty resides with the US Attorney General.
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At state-level, local prosecutors have final say (no involvement from state DA)
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Sentences decided by jury and must be unanimous
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Cannot be overruled by judge​
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In event of hung jury, life sentence is the default (even if there is one existent vote for death penalty)
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Excerpt from a General Facts Sheet regarding the Death Penalty on the DPIC Website. Features some general statistics about death row sentencing and how many times it gets overturned, highlighting some of the issues Dunham presents about the legal bureaucracy behind capital punishment.