Home > SUPPORT FOR DEATH PENALTY SOFTENS IN U.S. IPS News
SUPPORT FOR DEATH PENALTY SOFTENS IN U.S. IPS News
by Open-Publishing - Friday 7 April 20061 comment
Mark Sommer
MARCH 2006 (IPS) - In this article Sommer writes, alongside Iraq, Iran, and China, the United States remains the sole advanced democracy still cleaving to what much of the world views as state-sponsored homicide. At 64 percent, Americans’ support for the death penalty is 20 percent higher than Canada and 40 percent higher than Australia. Nonetheless, it is at its lowest level in 27 years and is lowest among youth, indicating that a shift may be in the offing.
Surprisingly, this shift is occurring most of all among some of those who until now have been adamantly opposed to abolishing the death penalty: Republican officeholders. The reason they are changing their minds is less ideological than pragmatic — a realisation that too often the wrong man is executed and the exorbitant cost of prosecution is stealing resources from law enforcement programmes of more proven effectiveness.
Forum posts
7 April 2006, 11:07
Since the American government is so deeply into the state-sponsored homicide (better known as "murder") called "war," why do people think they are going to give up killing people who they say have broken the law. If they cannot do this to their own population, how can they explain torturing foreigners to death in hidden camps? "We don’t torture, we just spend a very long time killing them."?