NEW YORK, NY – The New York Times Editorial Board is questioning the necessity of the death penalty in the context of a decline in general support among the American public from last October, citing a Gallup poll in which half of the Americans surveyed believe the death penalty is being “applied unfairly.”
The editorial, “America Does Not Need The Death Penalty,” reflects a longstanding viewpoint from The New York Times Editorial Board, stating how the death penalty is “arbitrarily and disproportionately applied to Black people and people with mental problems.”
This falls heavily alongside viewpoints from the general public despite this growing majority of people questioning the purpose of the death penalty, according to The New York Times, which also reported the Democratic Party dropped the subject of the death penalty from its 2024 platform.
This, in part, could be due to what the Times noted as the steady decline of federal executions overall, noting 13 executions this year as opposed to a whopping 85 back in 2000, a decline most recently because of a moratorium made by President Biden on federal executions in 2021, calling into question the practice of the executions themselves.
Several states have done something similar over “botched” lethal injections, as the piece recalls, noting a botched execution often brings into argument the Eighth Amendment and its ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.”
According to the Times, states where the lethal injection has been questioned, specifically Alabama, have looked to “asphyxiation by nitrogen gas,” where Kenneth Smith was chosen as the state’s experiment.
The Times editorial details this was the end of his long road in the Alabama Criminal Justice System after being accused and charged with the murder of Elizabeth Sennet in 1988.
The New York Times referenced a witness to his execution, stating Smith “writhed and heaved in apparent agony for several minutes before he died.”
While moratoriums against the death penalty have been placed in many states, it still remains on the federal level, and according to the Times, in 27 states.
As the Times points out, the death penalty won’t be a prevalent Democratic party platform going forward, but adds the power Biden still has in office to change it, and his 2020 campaign is explicitly against capital punishment. Biden’s campaign even stated that he’d ”work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level.”
The Times conceded that even if Biden fails to get it successfully into legislation, it could restart the conversation surrounding the death penalty.
Conversation invigorates voters, and voters, notes the Times, are the ones who can challenge lawmakers, and they, alongside the Biden Administration, can be what determines whether the death penalty is still a hot-button issue or simply something that will be drowned out in the noise of the 2024 election.
