It’s been a year of horror and upheaval for capital punishmen t in the US. Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center took reader questions today about what progress has been made — and what has yet to be done

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

This was a year of reckoning for the death penalty in America. In Oklahoma, Clayton Lockett’s botched execution took 43 minutes; a witness likened the procedure to “a horror movie”. In Ohio, Dennis McGuire gasped for air during many of the 26 minutes it took him to die from an experimental cocktail of execution drugs. In Arizona, Joseph Wood took an astonishing hour and forty minutes to die after being administered lethal injection drugs. All in all, 35 executions were carried out this year (many of which you can read about here).



On Thursday, the Death Penalty Information Center released its annual review of executions in the US and while it notes that the practice is on the decline overall in America, that record has been overshadowed by not only by botched executions but also extreme efforts by states to keep their protocols and sources for execution drugs secret.

Some of its key findings of DPIC’s report include:

There were 35 executions carried out in 2014, a 10% decline from the previous year, and a drastic drop from a high of 98 judicial killings in 1999.

Seven states carried out all 35 executions, and of those of those 80% were accounted for by just three states – Texas, Missouri and Florida.

Seven former death row inmates were exonerated in 2014 – the highest number since 2009 — but it took an average of 30 years to declare their innocence.

Given the massive controversy and mystery surrounding the death penalty in to, we asked DPIC’s Richard Dieter, and senior US reporter Ed Pilkington to join our readers for a discussion on the state of capital punishment in the US. Here’s what we learned:

We cannot conclude the death penalty deters crime

“There is no correlation between any purpose of the death penalty and murder”

A handful of states are responsible for most executions

Death penalty states “are in crisis”

Death penalty states will be thinking about alternatives to lethal injection...and they won’t be pleasant

The US supreme court could put an end to the death penalty once and for all, but it might take time

Continuing to carry out the death penalty is “a reflection on us”