In 2017, N.C. juries rejected the death penalty, more innocent people were released from death row, and public support for executions fell to a 45-year low. As we look to 2018, let’s skip the outdated death penalty rhetoric and start looking for solutions that actually make people safer — like properly staffing prisons and supplying guards with working radios.
Gallup Poll: The death penalty question they never ask
The question our society should be asking is not: Do you believe that people who commit murders should be punished? The answer to that is obvious. The question that gets to the heart of the matter is: What’s the fairest, most efficient, and most effective way to punish people who commit the worst crimes? When you ask it that way, the death penalty is clearly not the answer.
In the fight on crime, death is far more costly than life
Almost every time people discuss the death penalty on social media, at least one person chimes in with this opinion: We should execute people because it’s too expensive to keep them in prison for life. But the truth is, the death penalty costs far more than life without parole. Please read this post and help us spread the truth about the wasteful, inefficient death penalty.
As N.C. death penalty fades, death row becomes “costly warehouse for the elderly”
In 2016, N.C. passed the decade mark with no executions and sentenced just one new person to death. Yet, our state continues to spend millions each year to maintain the sixth largest death row in the nation — 150 aging people, the vast majority of whom have been there for more than a decade, with no executions on the horizon.
Another state dumps the death penalty
Delaware is the 20th state to make life without parole its maximum punishment, and the eighth since 2008. But those numbers don’t tell the whole story about just how obsolete the death penalty has become. Another 11 states have not carried out an execution in at least a decade – and North Carolina is one of them.
Exonerations set record pace in 2015
Exonerations have risen steadily in the U.S. in recent years. Last year, 149 people across the country were exonerated, the highest on record. Five N.C. exonerees spent a total of 89 years behind bars. Yet, those who have been freed are only a “drop in the bucket.” Thousands more innocent people remain in prison.
Death penalty use reaches historic lows in 2015
In North Carolina, juries did not impose a single new death sentence this year. It was the second year since 2012 that no one was sent to death row. We also neared a decade without an execution. Across the country, the death penalty reached its lowest point in the modern era with just 49 new death sentences and 28 executions. Even Texas only sent two people to death row.
Traumatized veterans get no mercy in N.C.
Just in time for Veterans Day, a sobering new report shows that North Carolina is one of many states that routinely condemns veterans to death and executes them, with little regard for the trauma they endured while serving our country. Twenty-four of North Carolina’s 148 death row inmates are military veterans. Six veterans have been executed.
New report: Reckless use of death penalty in N.C. threatens the innocent
What if we told you that almost every murder in N.C. is charged capitally? That cases are declared capital before police have completed thorough investigations? That the threat of death is used to bully people into pleading guilty, even though they might be innocent? These are the revelations in a new report from CDPL.
The numbers are in: NC’s death penalty fails
A new study exposes NC’s death penalty as an expensive exercise in futility. Among the findings: 74 percent of death sentences handed down in the past three decades have been overturned because of substantial errors.