The US re-legalized the death penalty 50 years ago. Is it working as intended?

The Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, where Daniel Lewis Lee was scheduled to be executed on 13 July 2020. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images View image in fullscreen The Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, where Daniel Lewis Lee was scheduled to be executed on 13 July 2020. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images Analysis The US re-legalized the death penalty 50 years ago. Is it working as intended? Maurice Chammah and Jill Castellano for the Marshall Project The Marshall Project analyzed over 9,000 death sentences handed down since states brought the punishment back Fifty years ago, Americans set out on a polarizing mission: to find a just and fair way to punish the worst-of-the-worst crimes by execution. In some ways, this was a surprising choice. In 1972, a narrow majority of the US supreme court had scrapped the country’s entire death penalty system, calling it “morally unacceptable”, “racially discriminatory” and “arbitrary”. It seemed possible that Americans might join our peers in Europe and Latin America, many of whom had ended executions for good. But then Americans, as we often do, went our own way. In the summer of 1976, the supreme court issued another landmark decision, Gregg v Georgia, that brought the death penalty back with a set of attempted fixes intended to make it less arbitrary, including guidance for jurors and automatic appeals. On the 50th anniversary of Gregg v Georgia, the Marshall Project analyzed more than 9,000 death sentences handed down across the nation since states brought the punishment back. The analysis also coincides with the release of The Last 12 Weeks , the Marshall Project’s new podcast with Serial Productions and the New York Times. The podcast features a case that has dragged on for more than 30 years, and the data suggests this is typical: people on death row and the families of their victims often have to wait decades for a resolution to their cases. Most of the time, the outcome is not an execution. If one goal of the death penalty is to deter crime, it’s hard to imagine anyone being deterred by a very low chance of being executed decades in the future. Last week, the Ohio governor Mike DeWine called for his state to abolish the death penalty, due to its failure as a deterrent and the emotional cost to victims’ families. “Our system is an epic fail,” said Frank Baumgartner, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor who spent years gathering the data with his students. “Every flaw they sought to rectify has been a failure, and now there are new problems that didn’t used to exist.” Black people are still overrepresented on state death rows . And whether someone gets the death penalty still depends more on where they commit a crime than on the crime itself . But the new data also reveals how rarely a death sentence ends as lawmakers intended: fewer than one out of every five people sent to death row has been executed. Supporters and opponents of capit