With the exception of Texas, the United States turns against the death penalty. The Economist reports:

Asked by pollsters whether they think murderers should be put to death, two-thirds of Americans say yes, down from four-fifths in 1994. If asked to choose between the death penalty and a life sentence with no chance of parole, however, they are evenly divided. Life that means life is relatively new. Before the 1990s, juries used to worry that if they did not send the man in the dock to his death, he would be freed to kill again after a decade or two. Now nearly every state allows the option of life without parole (Texas introduced it only in 2005). For the first time last year, a Gallup poll reported that a slim plurality of Americans found this option preferable to a capital sentence (48-47%).

Campaigners against the death penalty have been making their case state by state, with little fanfare but some success. The number of executions has fallen by 46% from its modern peak in 1999, to 53 last year (see chart 1). Two-thirds of states executed no one last year, and only six carried out multiple executions. The number of death sentences has fallen even more sharply, by 60% from a peak of about 300 a year in the mid-1990s.

I welcome this trend. The death penalty is cruel and brutalizes the society that practises it. It might be argued that a person who has killed someone else deserves to die, but the problem with this strict contractarian argument is that the only one entitled to perform the act is already dead.

(Photo shows the lethal injection table at San Quentin State Prison in California.)