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

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. …