The death penalty’s slow death is accelerating. At least 140 nations no longer use it. No nation in Europe uses the death penalty. No nation in the Western Hemisphere uses it, except the United States.
Twenty-nine U.S. states have banned capital punishment or imposed a moratorium, and most of the rest have effectively stopped using it.
Virginia, the northernmost east-coast state with the death penalty, has not sentenced anyone to death in over 8 years. Virginia’s death row holds only three men,