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November 27th, 2015 
Awake Goy The death penalty still exists, but USA Today recently described it as on “life support.” Last year, just 35 people were executed in the United States; this year it will almost certainly be fewer than 30 — the lowest number in 21 years. Since 2007, New Jersey, Nebraska, Maryland, Illinois, New Mexico, New York and Connecticut have joined the 12 states that had already banned the death penalty. Though capital punishment is still on the books in 31 states, only nine of them have executed a single person in the last three years. To be sure, it would be rash to conclude that the death penalty is definitely on the road to total abolition. But it is no exaggeration to say that, in the seven decades since the end of World War II, the movement against the death penalty has saved hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of lives.
Extra-judicial killings by the police, the all-too-common practice that ignited the current movement, now number more than 1,100 per year — more than four times the number of people lynched or executed by capital punishment in the worst of years. But street executions by the police, unconstrained by due process or any of the legal safeguards that limit capital punishment, are unlikely to be abolished — not in a country with more than 300 million guns in private hands, more than 11,000 homicides per year and 50 or so killings of law enforcement officers annually. Police killings can, however, be radically reduced, as can the number of people confined to prison. The task of the current movement — like the movements against lynching and the death penalty before it — is to challenge, with patience and unyielding pressure, the boundaries of what is morally acceptable and to ensure that the struggle for racial equality continues its long march forward.
_____________Jerome Karabel is Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. His current project, which he began as a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, is “Outlier Nation: The Roots and Consequences of American Distinctiveness,” a comparative study of twenty wealthy democratic countries.
Notes:
1. The Washington Post counts only fatal shootings by on-duty police officers, while theGuardian counts all police killings, including those people killed by tasers, police vehicles, and in custody.
2.This is an extrapolation from The Guardian’s “The Counted,” which reported 957 police killings as of October 31st, 2015. At the current rate, there will be an estimated 1,149 killings in calendar year 2015.
3. Calculated from “The Counted.” The Guardian.
4. Calculated from “Fatal Police Shootings Data” (Through October 31, 2015) The Washington Post
5. Personal communication from Professor Harry Levine, Queens College, City University of New York, July 1, 2015.
6. Some cases, however, were still pending.
7. Franklin E. Zimring and Brittany Arsiniega. “Trends in Killings Of And By Police: A Preliminary Analysis.” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, forthcoming.
8. Calculated from E. Ann Carson. “Prisoners In 2014.” Bureau of Justice Statistics. September 2014.
9. These figures are based in an estimate derived from The Guardian of about 300 police killings of African-Americans annually out of a black male population nationwide of roughly 20 million.
10. For an illuminating discussion of the human costs of mass incarceration, see “Who Pays? The True Cost of Incarceration on Families.” Oakland, CA, September 2015.
11. Calculated from “Executions In The U.S. 1608-2002: The Espy File.” Death Penalty Information Center.
12. Calculated from Chris Wilson. “Every Execution in U.S. History in a Single Chart.” Time. 24 July 2014.
Source Article from https://www.popularresistance.org/police-killings-surpass-worst-years-of-lynching-capital-punishment-2/
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