Is the End of the Death Penalty Near?

Is the end of the death penalty near? All of the statistics and facts seem to point towards this conclusion. One of the reasons the end may be coming is that, after all of the time and effort we've spent to try and improve how we carry out death sentences, moving from hanging, to execution, to lethal injection, in the end, we're not much better at it than we were before. In Arizona, it took prison official two hours to kill an inmate(Drehle, 29) and in Oklahoma, it took prison official approximately forty minutes to execute an inmate. In the beginning, when lethal injections were first being used as a more humane alternative to hangings, electrocutions, etc. it may have been acceptable, but once pharmaceutical companies began not allowing prisons to use their drugs to execute people, more and more executions began to go awry. It’s because of this that we end up with ridiculous situations like the ones in Oklahoma or Arizona. The crime rate has also dropped significantly since the death penalty was reinstituted in the United States. Now that the crime rate isn’t as high as it was before, the death penalty does not really seem as necessary. There are very little ways you can justify the use of the death penalty anymore, most of the historical justifications have since been removed and are no longer valid. Also, state government’s do not have as much money as they may have had before, so buying the chemicals and everything else required to execute an inmate is becoming a cost some governments are not willing to accept. All of these put together with the continued indecisiveness of the Supreme Court Justices that I have mentioned in previous posts, all point towards the end of the death penalty. The more I read, the more I continue to see that all of the experts, essentially every single article I can find everywhere, seems to say that the end of the death penalty is in sight, that it's just right around the corner. They show surveys and charts showing that approval of the death penalty is continuously decreasing, but at the end of the day, state legislatures are still turning down bills to end the death penalty, and there are still people being executed, like those in Arkansas. I feel as if no one is talking about them, and the situations that got them sentenced to death and the hows and whys of it all. It seems as if everyone is just focused on the bigger picture.

Works Cited

Von Drehle, David. "Bungled Executions. Backlogged Courts. And Three More Reasons the Modern Death Penalty Is a Failed Experiment. (Cover Story)." Time, vol. 185, no. 21, 08 June 2015, pp. 26-33. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=102909399&site=ehost-live.