Use of Capital Punishment Has Been Falling for Decades

For all the attention paid to Amy Coney Barrett’s religion and how it may affect her jurisprudence, we’ve heard quite little from anxious defenders of the death penalty. Many on the left have pointed to her co-authored 1998 law-review article “Catholic Judges in Capital Cases” as an indication of how her faith could affect her job — she wrote that judges should recuse themselves when their religious obligations prevent them from implementing the law — but few on the right seem worried that she might duck out of certain death-penalty cases, especially those involving the capital sentence itself. The article definitely hasn’t prompted the conservative scrutiny it would have if it had been about, say, guns or abortion.

A new report from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) suggests a reason: The death penalty simply isn’t the national political issue it used to be, because executions are dropping off across the country on their own.

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Robert VerBruggen

Robert VerBruggen is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

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For all the attention paid to Amy Coney Barrett’s religion and how it may affect her jurisprudence, we’ve heard quite little from anxious defenders of the death penalty. Many on the left have pointed to her co-authored 1998 law-review article “Catholic Judges in Capital Cases” as an indication of how her faith could affect her job — she wrote that judges should recuse themselves when their religious obligations prevent them from implementing the law — but few on the right seem worried that she might duck out of certain death-penalty cases, especially those involving the capital sentence itself. The article definitely hasn’t prompted the conservative scrutiny it would have if it had been about, say, guns or abortion.

A new report from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) suggests a reason: The death penalty simply isn’t the national political issue it used to be, because executions are dropping off across the country on their own.