Apropos the recent drop in support for the death penalty, it seems it happened before, and recently. The death penalty seems to have all but died out in the US between 1966 and 1980.
The following excerpts are from Thomas Laqueur's long, and IMO excellent, article on the history and meaning of the death penalty in America, which appears in the most recent issue of the London Review of Books (October 5, No. 17). Unfortunately it's not online. But it is still on the newstands.
<excerpts follow>
For most of its history the United States has been within the mainstream of Western enlightened thought and practice with respect to the death penalty. . . .Annual numbers of executions declined steadily after 1945 and by the early 1960s were barely a fifth of what they had been before the war. In 1965 -- the year Britain abolished the death penalty -- there were seven, compared, for example, to almost two hundred a year during the 1930s. There were two in 1966; one the year after; then none at all, and no further executions in the five years preceding the Supreme Court's decision in the _Furman v. Georgia_ case of 1972, which seemed to end capital punishment for good. . . ._Furman resulted in five more years of de facto abolition. Then, in 1977, came the execution in Utah of Gary Gilmore, a theatrically brilliant criminal and the subject of one of the great pieces of modern American writing, Norman Mailer's _The Executioner's Song_. Gilmore forswore further appeals and faced the firing squad wearing his famously indestructible Timex watch: scarcely typical and followed by a mere trickle of other deaths. There were no executions in 1978 or 1980, and one in 1981, the year France abandoned capital punishment. If not de jure, then de facto, the United States seemed to have abandoned this, the most ancient and most terrible of punishments. . . .But by the beginning of Ronald Reagan's second term, in 1984, however, something seems to have gone horribly wrong, or deliciously right, depending on one's point of view. The US struck out away from western democracies and found itself in very strange company indeed.
<end excerpt>
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com