Injection of Reflection

Texas has long been the Hang 'Em High state. In 2000, it executed convicted prisoners at the rate of almost one a week. Gov. George W. Bush seemed to take pride in turning down appeals for clemency. The "Decider" was known for spending as little as 15 minutes reviewing a death case. In a Talk magazine piece, Tucker Carlson reported that Bush mocked the plea of one double murderer on death row, pursing his lips in mock desperation and whispering, "Please, don't kill me." (Bush later said Carlson had "misread, mischaracterized me.")

Texas still accounts for more than half of all executions in the United States. But a strange thing is happening in the state that has executed more prisoners than any other since the U.S. Supreme Court revived the death penalty in 1976 after a brief hiatus. Texas prosecutors are less willing to seek, and juries are less willing to grant, capital punishment for aggravated murder. In 2006, only 15 Texas convicts were sentenced to death, down from 34 a decade earlier. Texas mirrors a national trend: death-penalty sentences in the 38 states that allow capital punishment dropped from 317 in 1996 to 128 in 2005, the latest year for which statistics are available.

Why the reluctance to populate death row? Polls show popular support for capital punishment stays relatively high, at about 65 percent. But when it comes to carrying out death sentences, the people involved—judges and juries, prosecutors and prison officials—are starting to recoil, or at least pull back. What is acceptable in theory seems less and less tolerable in practice. Indeed, the Supreme Court has called at least a temporary halt to executions while it examines the fine points of killing convicts by pumping lethal chemicals into their veins. "The death penalty may go out with a whimper, not a great moral revolution," says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C.

The new reluctance to punish by killing is part of a historical trend. There was a time when death and torture were spectator sports, when crowds flocked to see prisoners drawn and quartered or beheaded. In some parts of the world, flogging and stoning are still public spectacles. But in the 19th century, supposedly "enlightened" states began looking for more-humane ways to serve final justice—to kill people without causing too much suffering to either the victims or their executioners. The authorities tried hanging, firing squads, electrocutions, gas chambers and, more recently, lethal injection. Each method was supposed to be an improvement over the last.

But the results could be ghastly. Too much depended on the uneven skills of the executioners. The hangman's noose has to be handled just so. Too short a drop and the prisoner slowly strangles. Too long a drop and the prisoner can be decapitated. Witnesses to executions in the electric chair have watched, horrified, as flames shot out of the head of the doomed prisoner. In Arizona in 1992, the state attorney general vomited and the prison warden threatened to quit after observing the agonizingly slow death of a man in a gas chamber. Today not many doctors are willing to play any part in an execution, and prison guards often complain of little or no training.

Lethal injection is less violent than a firing squad and less grisly than the electric chair. In most states, the prisoner is given a "three-drug cocktail": a sedative to put him to sleep, a paralyzing agent to stop him from struggling (or breathing) and a drug to stop his heart. But, hands shaking, guards sometimes botch inserting the needle, and veins can be hard to find if the inmate was a drug addict. In Ohio, a prisoner raised his head to announce, "It's not working," and in Florida, a prisoner sustained chemical burns on his arm while he grimaced for almost a half hour. Inevitably, defense lawyers began to attack the cocktail as "cruel and unusual punishment," banned by the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.