Understanding the Death Penalty

The primary novel of our new Social Media unit is To Kill a Mockingbird, and a key plot line involves a man sentenced to the death penalty. Thus, it seemed fit to understand the death penalty a little bit more as we read the novel.

We took our information from the Death Penalty Information Center: "Facts about the Death Penalty".

Interesting Information:

• Since 1973 there have been 158 people released from death row after being proved innocent.
• This means that there are clearly accidents that occur in the placing of people on death row; they should have been absolutely certain about their guilt before making that decision.
• The number of people sentenced to death per year has dropped dramatically over the past decade.
• Is crime growing fewer or are we becoming more reluctant to sentence people to death?
• Less than 2% of those sentenced to the death penalty are women.
• Women generally are not responsible for serious crimes.

Conclusions:

Fig. 1

There are far more executions that have occurred in the southern United States in comparison to any other region, as shown in Fig. 1. This could mean that there is far more crime in the area, or it could be an effect of their attitude towards the death penalty. These states likely are in support of the death penalty, in contrast to the NorthEast, which commits very few executions.

Fig. 2 shows the racial breakdown of executions that have occurred since 1976. It is evident that white people have suffered a significantly larger amount of executions. This could be related to the fact that America is made up of more whites than any other race. 98.4% of executions were made up of three large cultural groups in America, whereas minorities see less death rows.

Fig. 2

Unanswered Questions:

• What exactly are crimes worthy of the death penalty?
• Are regions that do not perform the death penalty as regularly less full of crime? Or is it just their reluctance that keeps the death penalty down?