Failure to Kill

The U.S. is one of the few western countries where execution remains the punishment for heinous crimes. About sixty percent of the states and the federal government have retained it, but roughly two-thirds of executions since 1976 – when new death penalty laws were affirmed by the Supreme Court – have occurred in six states: Texas, Virginia, Florida, Missouri, Louisiana and Oklahoma. Like euthanasia enthusiasts, death penalty abolitionists argue for their cause as a matter of "human rights." I have no use for that sanctimonious bundling. The 1948 Declaration of Human Rights deliberately avoided condemnation of the death penalty, except...