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Annual Review of Law and Social Science

Volume 20, 2024

Challenges to the Contemporary Death Penalty in the United States

  • Paul Kaplan1
  • School of Public Affairs, San Diego State University, San Diego, California, USA; email: [email protected]
  • Vol. 20:353-368 (Volume publication date October 2024)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on July 02, 2024
  • Copyright © 2024 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

This review focuses on empirical research about contemporary challenges to the death penalty in the United States. Challenges are factors that obstruct capital punishment, including legal or political restrictions; elimination at the federal or state level; or the hindrance of the process at its operational stages of charging, adjudicating, appeals, clemency, or executions. By the best-known measures, the death penalty has been in decline in the United States since the turn of the century. Lethal injection errors—“botches”—are arguably the most important current challenge to the institution. Wrongful capital conviction has made capital punishment less tolerable to the general public. Mitigation remains an important challenge to the death penalty. This review emphasizes botches, innocence, and mitigation but also touches on disparate impact, failure-to-deliver a social benefit, and cost. Along the way, this review proposes a framework for considering challenges as they occur on two continua of impact, a micro/meso/macro axis and a narrow/wide axis.

Keyword(s): botched execution, death penalty, mitigation, race, wrongful conviction
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2024-10-17
2025-06-23
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Challenges to the Contemporary Death Penalty in the United States
Annual Review of Law and Social Science 20, 353 (2024); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-041922-042705
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-041922-042705
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-041922-042705
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