Death Penalty Death Knell

Why not start off the New Year with an intense topic? The death penalty.

There are a few topics in America that are polarizing, you know, where people stand on one side of the line or the other. But the death penalty is one of them. Either you are for it or against it.

In Texas, there is a raging debate about whether a truly innocent man was executed last fall. This debate is what death penalty proponents have worried about forever and anti-death penalty advocates knew would happen sooner or later. However, it's not quite clear, of course, whether the man was innocent....

Then there were the problems in administering the lethal injection in Ohio, which resulted in suspending the executions of two inmates.

Today's news brought another interesting twist in the debate. The very think tank that crafted the legal underpinnings to the Gregg v. Georgia decision in 1976 by the US Supreme Court, opening the door, again, for capital punishment, is going out of businesses because, essentially, they can no longer justify the death penalty. Now, they didn't say it that boldly, but that is what happened.

It will be interesting to watch as debates over capital punishment begin to unfold in the next few years. It's political hot potatoes to come out against the death penalty, particularly if you're a Democrat. President Obama supported the death penalty in his presidential campaign, even for non-capital but heinous crimes such as child rape. Slowly, very slowly, the US Supreme Court has been narrowing the ability of state's to administer the ultimate penalty.

Which is to say, nothing is every final in our society. The death penalty was abolished in 1962, re-instituted in 1976 and may well be effectively abolished again in the near future.