Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
The US only actually executes a fairly small percentage of prisoners on death row (i.e.: prisoners awaiting execution)... which means that the likelihood of dying as a result of being sentenced to death is actually smaller than the likelihood of death in some dangerous professions. Or so I read.
If that's true, as suggested by Sonist's caveat of "timely enforcement", that may well mean that the US has the death penalty without enjoying any meaningful deterrent force thereof... primarily because actually having the death penalty enforced on you, even if you are sentenced, is too unlikely.
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Based on what I've seen from a few sources (
http://www.antideathpenalty.org/statistics.html and
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions-year being the easiest to sort through compared to the government sites), 42 in 2007, 37 people were executed last year, and 40 this year. Overall it is a downward trend, from 98 back in 1999. To date, since executions were reinstated in the US in 1976, 1176 people have been executed. Just under 1200 people in 32 years is pretty low. Compare that to highway workers, where in 2005 alone, 336 people were killed in the US (
http://www.nawic.org/images/nawic/Highvisibility.pdf). Going off last year's stats, 0.00001216% of our population was executed. Not a high number at all, especially when you start comparing to countries like China.