Nebraska’s legislature recently made headlines when it ended the state’s death penalty. Many found it odd that a conservatives-dominated legislature would support ending capital punishment, since conservative politicians have traditionally supported the death penalty. However, an increasing number of conservatives are realizing that the death penalty is inconsistent with both fiscal and social conservatism. These... Read More

The guillotine has an image problem, but you can say this for it: even in today’s deeply hollowed out America, someone somewhere can probably still make a sharp blade. The same cannot be said for sodium thiopental, an anesthetic used in execution by lethal injection. Since 2010, when the last American manufacturer Hospira decided to... Read More

Hanged, drawn, and quartered. (source) Although the Middle Ages were, in the imagination of our contemporaries, “the time of the gallows,” the reality was appreciably different (Carbasse, 2011, pp. 38-39) Like many well-meaning people, I once considered the death penalty a relic of a more barbaric age. Outside the old jailhouse, here in Quebec City,... Read More

There is no more heinous or morally indefensible crime than capital punishment. Nor is there is any person, however monstrous, deserving of execution at the hands of the state. We may never know the motives behind the actions of many criminals, but we can fully grasp the culpability of the state. For it is the... Read More

The Supreme Court is on a rip against the death penalty, ruling last week that mentally retarded convicts can't be executed and this week that only juries, not judges, can decide the facts that justify imposing death. Neither decision appears to be very good law, but it's the former decision that takes the prize for... Read More

In the current crusade against the death penalty, one bad argument seems to be just as good as another. Having convinced various conservatives to doubt or actually oppose capital punishment because DNA testing shows some convicts to be innocent, the crusaders are now trying to work on the liberals with the argument that the death... Read More

The case for capital punishment used to be pretty much a no-brainer, at least for conservatives who believe in right and wrong, law and order, and the authority to reward and punish. But today, with conservative gurus like Pat Robertson, George Will and William F. Buckley Jr. casting doubt on the death penalty and a... Read More

One of the sneakier tactics of the anti-death penalty lobby, led by the American Civil Liberties Union and similar groups, is to claim that capital punishment ought to be abolished because blacks are sentenced to death more often than whites or because poor people get the hot juice more frequently than rich people. Because everybody... Read More