AFP

ANGEL DIAZ took part in a robbery in Miami, in 1979, and was convicted seven years later of killing a bar manager during the crime. In December the state of Florida executed him by lethal injection. But Mr Diaz took twice as long to die as is usual, and some thought they saw him grimace in pain when he should have been unconscious and paralysed. When it was finally over, he had foot-long burns on each arm.

A report into his grisly last moments was released on Thursday March 1st, with recommendations for Florida's new governor, Charlie Crist. It concluded that what happened to Mr Diaz will almost certainly happen again—the needles that punctured his veins went in too far and injected the drugs into his flesh, requiring a second injection. And yet the report merely recommended better training for execution teams, and the elimination of one of the three drugs in the execution cocktail (the one paralysing the prisoner, which may mask whether he is in pain), along with other tweaks. The death penalty is safe in Florida for now.

Florida is keener on the death penalty than most states, although Texas, Virginia, Missouri and Oklahoma each execute more. Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1977, just over 1,000 people have been executed, with a peak in 1999. Since then, however, America's ardour for executions has declined. Not only are fewer on death row actually being executed. From 317 in 1996, the number of new death sentences has dropped steadily to 114 last year. By law, only jurors who agree in principle with the possibility of the death penalty are allowed to serve on capital juries. This, naturally, tends to bias juries towards the death penalty. Yet even those who theoretically agree with death sentences are showing themselves more reluctant to hand them out.

The trend is matched by federal jurisprudence and by actions of the states. Execution is typically a state affair under laws chosen by state legislatures, but takes place within federal legal guidelines. In the past few years, the Supreme Court eliminated two of the most egregious kinds: in 2002 it stopped executions of the mentally retarded; in 2005 it called a halt to the death penalty for those who were minors when they committed their crimes.

Many big states have begun to move tentatively against the death penalty, too. In 2000 Illinois's governor imposed a moratorium on executions, saying he couldn't be sure that the process was working properly. In 2004, New York's state Supreme Court struck down the execution law in the state on similar grounds; the state legislature has declined to reinstate it, leaving New York with a de facto moratorium. A commission in New Jersey reported in January that there is little chance that state's execution law can be made to conform with the state's constitution, and recommended doing away with it.

Washington state last year came within one judicial vote (in a 4-5 split) of binning the death penalty, after a confessed murderer of one woman was put to death while a serial murderer of 48 victims had received life in prison after co-operating with the authorities. By one count last year, the death penalty was “on hold” in some form in eight states, thanks to the evidence that it is applied arbitrarily (as in the Washington example), incompetently (as in the Diaz case), incorrectly (Florida has released 22 prisoners from death row on grounds of innocence in 34 years), or with racial bias (blacks get it more often than whites).

Does this glimpse of a trend mean America as a whole may yet abolish the death penalty? Not any time soon. Public opinion continues, heavily, to support its use. But when pollsters add the option of “life without parole” to their questions, the death penalty's support drops to about even with non-death punishments. The use of the death penalty may yet become rarer, if not extinct, in America.