Time -- David Von Drehle -- The Death of the Death Penalty
Capital Punishment in the United States
Tsarnaev is in no danger of imminent death. He is one of more than 60 federal prisoners under sentence of execution in a country where only three federal death sentences have been carried out in the past half-century. A dozen years have passed since the last one.
The shift is more pragmatic than moral, as Americans realize that our balky system of state-sanctioned killing simply isn’t fixable. As a leader of the Georgia Republican Party, attorney David J. Burge, recently put it, “Capital punishment runs counter to core conservative principles of life, fiscal responsibility and limited government. The reality is that capital punishment is nothing more than an expensive, wasteful and risky government program.”
The Justices all know that the modern death penalty is a failure. When they finally decide to get rid of it, “evolving standards” is how they will do it.
The facts are irrefutable, and the logic is clear. Exhausted by so many years of trying to prop up this broken system, the court will one day throw in the towel.
Wikipedia -- Capital Punishment
"Many countries have abolished capital punishment either in law or in practice. Since World War II there has been a trend toward abolishing the death penalty. 36 retained the death penalty in active use, 103 countries had abolished capital punishment altogether, 6 had done so for all offences except under special circumstances and 50 have abolished it in practice because they had not used it for at least 10 years or were under a moratorium"
"In the European Union member states, Article 2 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union prohibits the use of capital punishment.[4] The Council of Europe, which has 47 member states, also prohibits the use of the death penalty by its members.
The United Nations General Assembly has adopted, in 2007, 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2014[5] non-binding resolutions calling for a global moratorium on executions, with a view to eventual abolition "
