To the contrary, I've agreed with you that it is. My point is that we have no ethical justification for using it the way we currently do.
The PDF I lined has the numbers broken down by state. I'm not even sure what you mean by "the federal government almost never uses the death penalty; the local government has to", since the allowing or disallowing of the death penalty is handled at the state level.
Looking at the penalty being used in the country as a whole, I don't think 7,403 sentences and 885 executions over the course of 30 years is "almost never", but that wasn't my point anyway; my point was the 2,032 of those 7,403 sentences that were overturned. That's completely unacceptable. |
