When Execution Drugs Are in Short Supply…
…alternative methods will be found. Since, as the Court held in Glossip, “the death penalty is constitutional,” and since a majority of our citizens continue to support it, and since gruesome murders continue to be committed that warrant it, we will continue to administer it. This is true despite false claims that “the death penalty is dying.” Instead, over the last five years, we have had an average of one execution every 17 days, and, after years of decline (as the murder rate declined), support for capital punishment has held stable at 55% over that time.
The latest news is from South Carolina, which is bringing back firing squads.
Here’s the start of the story:
South Carolina is poised to bring back firing squads to its list of execution methods amid a shortage of drugs to carry out lethal injections in an effort to resume capital punishment after a decade.
The state House voted 66-43 Wednesday on legislation that would allow death row inmates to choose between being shot or electrocuted if lethal injection drugs aren’t available. The state is one of nine that still use the electric chair and will become the fourth to use firing squads.
The state Senate approved the bill in March. After another routine vote in the House, the bill will head to the desk of Republican Gov. Henry McMaster, who said he will sign it.
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A perhaps more newsworthy event was the abolition of the death penalty in Virginia this year, a development that, in my opinion, marks a seismic shift in the landscape of capital punishment. We shall see if the death penalty is dying or merely on life support….
For the first time in a long time, the death penalty shows a decisive partisan divide, with Republicans strongly in favor, Independents less so, and Democrats opposed. That told the story in Virginia: the Democrats won both houses of the legislature last year, and thus (with minimal Republican support) were able to pass a measure with little substantive but (as you suggest) considerable symbolic significance.
Virginia is often (and technically correctly) described as the capital of the Confederacy, but that’s not what tells the tale now, not at all. The politics of the state are dictated by two related developments, first, the explosive growth of the suburbs, particularly in Fairfax County (which has no southern feel to it at all), and the Richmond area; and second, the fact that those suburbs are socially liberal and found DJT absolutely toxic.
As noted in my entry, erosion of support for the DP nationwide stopped four or five years ago, when the murder rate shot up in 2015 and 2016. But when Policy X continues to have the support of 55% nationally, and of the courts, then Policy X is neither dying nor on life support. And there’s this too: The abolitionist forces have now picked the low-hanging fruit. Most of the states where repeal is possible have already done it, now including Virginia. Abolitionism’s climb from here on in gets steeper. And if the explosion of the murder rate we’ve seen over the last year and a half continues for much longer at all, it gets steeper to the point of impossibility.
One other point. If the DP were put to a statewide referendum, as in California in 2012 and 2016, it would get re-instated. Indeed, the DP has never in the country’s history been repealed by a vote of the people. This of course explains why Virginia Democrats made sure the deed got done in the legislature rather than by referendum. They knew what they were doing.