Last week, we brought you the story of a shocking new statistic which shows that it may be time for the U.S. to re-evaluate its collective view of the death penalty.
According to new Pew Research, it was discovered that support for the death penalty is at a four-decade low, alongside a 25-year low in executions nationwide.
Responding to this new information, Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted on Monday morning, calling for the United States to follow the rest of the Western world and eliminate capital punishment.
Virtually every Western industrialized country has chosen to end capital punishment. The United States should join them. https://t.co/U4RB6VbSJS
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) October 3, 2016
Support for the death penalty peaked during the early ’90s when violent crime spiked. The rate has dropped dramatically since then, but it has taken much longer for support for the death penalty to fall.
Now, only a handful of states still actively use the death penalty. In 2015, only five states carried out executions. Other states have laws for executions on the books but no longer carry them out.
While support for capital punishment was once equal among Republicans and Democrats, Democratic support for state-sponsored murder is down to 34 percent. As a progressive independent, Bernie’s opposition to capital punishment is a no-brainer.
Unfortunately, the support for the death penalty on the Republican side hasn’t budged, with a full 72 percent of the GOP claiming that they want to see our government killing folks on the regular.
Either way, we must take a moment to re-evaluate our collective view of this practice. Is it time to end it? Bernie says ‘yes.’
