Shifting Politics on the Death Penalty

In January 1992, Bill Clinton, then the governor of Arkansas, left the presidential campaign trail to fly home for the execution of a man named Ricky Ray Rector. Mr. Clinton’s decision not to grant clemency to Mr. Rector, who had been sentenced to death for killing a police officer, was widely seen as an attempt to fend off the familiar charge that Democrats were soft on crime.

On Dec. 31, Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland, whose name has been mentioned among potential 2016 Democratic presidential candidates, commuted the sentences of the last four inmates on the state’s death row.

Maryland abolished the death penalty in 2013, but only for new sentences. In resentencing the condemned men to life without parole, Mr. O’Malley said that leaving their death sentences in place would “not serve the public good of the people of Maryland — present or future.”

Whether or not Mr. O’Malley runs for president, his action is a mark of how quickly the death penalty debate in America has shifted. Liberals have long opposed capital punishment, and now more conservatives are speaking out against it as well, variously describing it as immoral, unjust, racist, arbitrary, costly and ineptly carried out.

Thirty-five people were put to death in 2014, the fewest in 20 years, according to a report last month by the Death Penalty Information Center. All but seven of the executions took place in three states: Texas, Missouri and Florida. And while two-thirds of those executed were black, only six had been convicted of killing a black person, even though blacks make up almost half of all murder victims.

Another sign of the times: Fewer people are put on death row. There were 72 new death sentences in 2014, the lowest number since 1974.

In various decisions, the Supreme Court has helped to reduce these numbers, barring the execution of the mentally ill, the intellectually disabled and those who were minors at the time of their crimes. But states have found ways around those rulings, and have executed many people who fall into one or more of these categories — people like John Errol Ferguson, who was schizophrenic and sat on Florida’s death row for 34 years before he was executed in 2013, and Marvin Wilson, who had an I.Q. of 61 and was executed in Texas in 2012.

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