Have you ever wondered why Maine doesn’t have the death penalty? Here’s the history and six other facts about the ultimate punishment.
1. The last person to be executed in Maine was Daniel Wilkinson in 1885. In front of thousands of spectators, Wilkinson died a slow death of strangulation due to a poorly tied hangman’s noose. The botched execution fueled the drive for the Maine Legislature to abolish the death penalty, which it did in 1887. Thirty-two states currently have the death penalty on the books, but just five states (California, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania and Alabama) account for a majority of people on death row.
2. Most people in the U.S. support the death penalty, but approval is at a 40-year low. According to Pew Research Center, 56 percent favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, and 38 percent are opposed. The change in opinion has largely happened among Democrats and women, though the share of independents and Republicans who favor the death penalty has decreased over time.
3. Even people who support the death penalty say there is a risk an innocent person will be put to death. Pew found that just 26 percent of people in its latest national survey think there are adequate safeguards to protect against an innocent person being executed. A 2014 analysis estimated that if all defendants sentenced to death remained under that sentence indefinitely, at least 4.1 percent would be exonerated.
4. About 35 percent of people in the Pew study said the death penalty deters serious crime, while 61 percent said it didn’t. Existing research is inconclusive on whether the death penalty is a deterrent. It is clear, though, that police can deter criminal behavior when they strengthen the perception that criminals will get caught.
5. It costs more to execute a prisoner than to lock the person up for life. A Seattle University study, for example, examined the costs relating to pursuit of the death penalty — including jail costs, trial and court costs, prosecution costs and police costs — and found it was more expensive than when prosecutors do not seek execution. In addition, empirical studies have found that managing inmates on death row costs more, on average, than managing inmates not on death row, due to inmate-to-staff ratios, higher levels of security and differences in cell space, as many death-row inmates are held in cells of their own.
6. There are measurable racial disparities in who gets sentenced to death. Blacks and whites are victims of homicide in roughly equal numbers. But nearly 80 percent of people executed are convicted of killing white victims.
7. How often do executions get botched? The British Journal of American Legal Studies looked at 9,000 executions that happened in the U.S. from 1900 to 2011. It found 270 executions — or 3 percent — involved “departures from the protocol of killing someone sentenced to death” and were essentially botched. Executions by lethal injection were botched at a higher rate — 7 percent — than any other execution method used since the late-19th century.
