Death penalty has been surrounded by new uncertainty in 2015

If you want to see what’s happened to the death penalty in the United States, you might look toward Oklahoma, where Richard Glossip was hours from execution twice in one month — and survived.

As a lethal injection loomed Sept. 16, an Oklahoma appeals court granted Glossip a two-week reprieve so it could review his murder conviction for orchestrating the 1997 death of motel owner Barry Van Treese. Glossip was convicted largely on the word of the man who carried out the killing and has always maintained he is innocent.

Then, when Glossip’s death sentence wasn’t overturned, he narrowly avoided the needle again on Sept. 30, when Oklahoma officials realized they didn’t have the correct drugs.

Now, Glossip’s execution and all others in Oklahoma are on hold indefinitely while the state reviews its procedures, throwing uncertainty into one of the nation’s last death-penalty strongholds.

Capital punishment continued a years-long decline in 2015 as America carried out its fewest executions in 24 years, and opponents say there are strong signs that the long-term future of the death penalty is in doubt.

The new year might provide significant support for forces seeking to end capital punishment. The South has largely been an exception to the diminishment of the death penalty, but even in that region there have been some signs of uncertainty about its use.

The 28 inmates executed in the U.S. this year mark a precipitous fall since the modern peak of 98 executions in 1999, when the nation’s homicide rate was much higher and the public voiced stronger worries about crime.

While a majority of Americans still favor capital punishment, surveys from Gallup and the Pew Research Center this year showed public opposition to the death penalty at its highest levels in four decades — about 37%, both groups found.

Some of the nation’s top officials have also registered concern. President Obama made headlines in October when he called the implementation of the death penalty “deeply troubling” in the wake of several lethal injections in 2014 that did not kill inmates as quickly or peacefully as intended.

Meanwhile, two liberal members of the U.S. Supreme Court, Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, also signaled they would be open for a historic challenge to capital punishment.

Breyer called the death penalty “unfair, cruel and unusual” in dissent to the court’s 5-4 ruling in June that approved the chemicals Oklahoma used in its execution procedures. (In 1972, a Supreme Court ruling put a moratorium on the death penalty that lasted until 1976.)

While thousands of death-penalty cases across the nation remain mired in delays and appeals, six death row inmates won exonerations this year after proving they were wrongfully convicted, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

In Alabama, Anthony Ray Hinton was 29 when he was sent to death row after being convicted of killing two fast-food workers in 1985. He was 58 when he walked free in April after experts determined they couldn’t link the bullets from the shooting to the gun that Hinton owned.

There was no other evidence that tied him to the crime.

“All they had to do was to test the gun, but when you think you’re high and mighty and you’re above the law, you don’t have to answer to nobody,” Hinton told reporters after he was released, according to CNN.

In the long term, the drop in executions also looks to continue due in part to state officials and local prosecutors.

U.S. states issued just 49 new death sentences in 2015, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center — the fewest since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1973.

Several states are struggling to import the needed chemicals for the few lethal injections that do have the legal approval to go ahead.

Texas, the state that regularly carries out the nation’s most executions, handed down just two new death sentences this year. The Texas Tribune reported that it was also Texas’ lowest number of new sentences since the 1970s.

The number of states that allow executions also diminished this year as elected officials reconsidered the death penalty on moral and practical grounds.

Outgoing Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley commuted the death sentences of the state’s last four remaining death-row inmates in January — the state had already banned any more death penalties — and Connecticut’s Supreme Court banned its death penalty in August.

Legislators in Nebraska overrode a governor’s veto to successfully ban the death penalty in May, making Nebraska’s the first conservative-dominated Legislature to outlaw the death penalty since North Dakota in 1973.

But the question isn’t entirely settled.

Death penalty supporters gathered enough signatures to put the issue on the ballot, and Nebraska will host what promises to be a widely watched November showdown that will test the extent to which voters in a conservative state still favor capital punishment.

It’s almost a litmus test more than anything: Nebraska hasn’t executed anyone since 1997.

matt.pearce@latimes.com

Twitter: @MattDPearce

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