So have more Americans. Again, from the DPIC's report:

Also this year, the Gallup Poll, which measures the public's support for the death penalty, but without offering alternatives, recorded the lowest level of support and the highest level of opposition in almost 40 years. Only 61 percent supported the death penalty, compared to 80 percent in 1994. Thirty-five percent were opposed, compared to 16 percent in 1994. A more in-depth CNN poll gave respondents a choice between the death penalty and life without parole for those who commit murder. Fifty percent chose a life sentence, while 48 percent chose death.

The most ardent supporters of capital punishment -- the ones who want more, not fewer executions -- look at all these figures and say in frustration: "Of course the rate of executions is down. This is down because of soft judges and crafty defense attorneys, and because of the murderers themselves, who with nothing to lose and nothing better to do have succeeded in choking the criminal justice system with all their bogus appeals." It's the same tired argument these folks have made for years, however, and it's clearly getting less traction -- in courtrooms, in living rooms, and in state legislatures.

Take the big death penalty stories of 2011. They all buttress the figures offered by the DPIC. For example, there was the dramatic September execution in Georgia of Troy Davis, which educated millions of people about the fallibility of eyewitness testimony in criminal cases. Reasonable people have reasonably disagreed about whether justice was served in the case, but one essential fact has always jumped out at me. After a trial that included at least 40 witnesses, it took Davis' jury less than two hours to convict him of murder. That's just not good enough.

Nor was the year's ghastly search by officials in several states for a key ingredient of the drug cocktail used in lethal injections. These executioners were forced to scramble like thieves for the drug sodium thiopental when its American manufacturer, Hospira, stopped making the product. What does it say about a state -- and a society -- that has to buy its lethal drugs on the sly through a private middleman, as Nebraska evidently did recently? It sends the same ghoulish message to the nation -- and to the world -- that the audience at a Republican debate in September sent when it wildly cheered the record rate of executions in Texas.

Following those cheers, Texas Gov. Rick Perry chillingly told debate moderator Brian Williams that night that he "never struggled" with the idea that one of the men executed during his tenure was innocent. This says more about Perry, of course, than it does about the Texas' capital punishment regime, which has been repeatedly criticized even by the conservative United States Supreme Court. It says the gulf between the cavalier attitude of officials like Perry and the injustice often foisted upon capital convicts is large and growing larger.