Because the death penalty has been less and less used in the US?

Winston-Salem (USA) to Brazil

The United States recorded in 2015 a historically low number of executions and death sentences, according to a report released on Wednesday by the Death Penalty Information Center (Information Center on Death Penalty), based in Washington.

The report said the 28 executions of condemned to death registered this year is down 20% from 2014 and the lowest number since 1991, when 14 prisoners were executed.

It was also the first time in 24 years that the number of executions fell below 30. Last year, 35 prisoners were executed.

The number of death sentences dropped 33% compared to 2014 and is the lowest since the 1970s, when the Supreme Court of the United States suspended the death penalty (1972 to 1976).

This year, 14 states and the federal government sentenced 49 people to death. In 2014, there were 73 death sentences.

Only six states (Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Virginia) have led executions, the lowest number in 27 years, three of which (Texas, Missouri and Georgia) accounted for 86% of the executions.



Geographic concentration

"Over the past 15 years, there is a downward trend in the death penalty in the United States," he told BBC Brazil the report's author, Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

"There is increasing evidence that the death penalty is not only becoming more rare, but also concentrated in a very small number of states and counties."

He points out that more than a quarter of those sentenced to death this year were sentenced in Florida or Alabama after not unanimous jury decisions.

These two states, along with Delaware are the only ones in the country that allow the decision is not unanimous in death sentence cases.

The report indicates that 2% of US counties are responsible for more than half of the prisoners sentenced to death in the United States.



Which gives

Since 1976, when the death penalty was again adopted, 1,422 people were executed in the United States.

The peak was in 1999, with 98 executions. Since then, the trend has been falling.

This year, the number of prisoners on death row (2984) fell below 3000 for the first time since 1995.

The death penalty is adopted in 31 American states and also by the federal government. Eighteen states have abolished the practice.

In a 19th state, Nebraska, the death penalty was abolished in a vote in the legislature in May this year, but the new law has been suspended after positive practice and political activists collected 143,000 signatures to reverse the decision.

The issue will be voted on by state voters in a referendum in November next year.

Innocent

For Dunham, several factors explain the decline in the use of the death penalty.

"A major is the fact that the American public is increasingly concerned about the possibility that innocent people have been sentenced to death or executed," he says.

Since 1973 a total of 156 people on death row have been exonerated after it was proved they were innocent and had been convicted unjustly, many of them after spending decades in prison.

This year alone, six prisoners on death row were exonerated of all charges. At least 70 people with executions scheduled for 2015 received postponements, suspension or commutation of sentence.

According to Dunham, "the public is seeing that much of the evidence where capital cases are traditionally based are not as solid as it was believed" he says.

He cites cases where it was proven that innocent people were convicted on false evidence, cases of people incorrectly identified by witnesses, fabricated confessions and other faults.

"In five of the six cases of exoneration this year there was evidence of misconduct by the prosecution," he says.

"While there is evidence of misconduct, there is no guarantee that the innocent are not convicted and sentenced to death."

Drugs

Studies in several states also indicate that the cost of the death penalty are greater than to keep a convicted to life imprisonment.

Another factor cited by Dunham is the difficulty faced some years ago by the states for the drugs used in lethal injection.

The pressure laboratories and European groups against the use of its drug in executions has made it increasingly difficult to obtain the components of the cocktail used in lethal injection. Some states even tried to import drugs illegally.

There were also cases of executions that came out wrong. The most notorious occurred last year in Oklahoma, where the prisoner Clayton Lockett, who should be anesthetized, woke up and came to warn that the drugs were not working before dying for 43 minutes to die.

"The public has been affected by all this. The fact that states have tried to import drugs illegally, that States have shown high levels of incompetence carry out executions in order," says Dunham.

"People wonder whether you can trust the state to do so in a way," he says. "All this contributes to a reduction in support for the death penalty."

Opinion of change

According to opinion polls, most Americans are in favor of the death penalty, but the percentage has been falling in recent decades.

Survey by the Pew Research Center this year reveals that 56% of Americans favor the death penalty. 20 years ago, this percentage was 78%.

"Public support for the death penalty in most polls fell about 20 percentage points in the last generation," says Dunham, citing a study by the University of North Carolina who analyzed 488 national surveys on the subject conducted in the last 40 years.

But despite the downward trend, the death penalty still has many supporters in the United States who have been mobilizing to preserve the practice.

In California, a group of promoters and murder victims' families launched a campaign to speed up the appeals process in cases of prisoners on death row and reduce costs.

State voters will vote on the initiative in a referendum in November 2016. In another referendum on the same date, Californians will decide whether or not to abolish the practice.

Other initiatives in states like Florida and North Carolina also seek to streamline the process.

One criticism of the death penalty is that the process is so time consuming that many prisoners end up dying of natural causes while on death row awaiting execution.