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Capital punishment is on the decline, largely because of DNA testing and its ramifications for the legal system.
At first glance, the decline of the death penalty in the United States is somewhat surprising. * In the 1990s, death sentences and executions reached peak levels in the wake of the Supreme Court's 1976 reinstatement of capital punishment, after a four-year gap. Public support for the death penalty has declined since 1994, according to the Gallup Poll, but still stood at 67 percent last year.
Most Republican candidates and officeholders are strong supporters of the death penalty, and even Democratic candidates have generally embraced capital punishment ever since Michael Dukakis lost his presidential bid in 1988 partly because his opposition to the death penalty opened him to the "soft on crime" label.
Notwithstanding the politics of capital punishment, however, the number of executions in the United States dropped to 53 in 2006 from a peak of 98 in 1999. An even more telling figure, many experts say, is the decline in death sentences, just 128 nationwide in 2005 after hitting 317 in 1996. And when Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., ran for president in 2004, his opposition to capital punishment was not a big issue.
What changed? The biggest factor, according to many experts, is that the introduction of DNA testing in criminal cases in the early 1990s has cast a shadow over the legal system. DNA testing can provide exact matches between suspects and crimescene evidence such as blood, semen, and hair, even years after a murder, and it can also prove that a suspect-or a convict-did not commit the crime in question. The New York City-based Innocence Project, co-founded by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, lists 200 post-conviction exonerations in the U.S. stemming from DNA testing. Fourteen of those cases involved death sentences. In light of such findings, and after a rash of wrongful convictions, Illinois Gov. George Ryan, a conservative Republican, commuted the sentences of 171 condemned men in 2003.
"In the early days, it was assumed that we just didn't make mistakes with any regularity in serious felony convictions, and the emergence of all these DNA exonerations has, I think, slowed down enthusiasm for the death penalty," says Daniel Givelber, a law...