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Your assignment is to prepare and submit a paper on declining support for the death penalty

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Your assignment is to prepare and submit a paper on declining support for the death penalty. During the eighties and the nineties, support for the death penalty had been higher than seventy percent with a survey in 1996 revealing that seventy-eight percent of the people supported the death penalty while only eighteen were against it. Most of the decrease in this support through the last two decades has been seen among the democrats with only forty percent of the democrats currently favoring the death penalty, while fifty-six percent of them are against it. However, in the survey that was conducted in 1996, the democrats had almost overwhelming support for the death penalty (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press). These forms of significant changes in opinion have not been seen among the Republicans as they have continued to support the death penalty with a decline in support of only ten percentage points since 1996. On the other hand, the fraction of independents in support of the death sentence has decreased by twenty-two points over the same period from seventy-nine percent to fifty-seven percent, (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press).

In theory, 32 states as well as the federal government of the US permit capital punishment, however, in practice, this approach to punishing criminals has been essentially abandoned in most of the states. Most of the juries now sentence defendants to death and there has been a decrease in the number of executions between 1976 and the present for a variety of reasons. A predominant reason is the recent unavailability of drugs that are used for lethal injection all over the country, and numerous states imposed moratoriums as they waited for the Supreme Court to decide Glossip v.Gross that may result in changes in the approaches used for execution (Jost 269). This and the prolonged appeal processes that usually follow convictions cannot affect the rate of death penalties. Undeniably, death sentences, as well as executions, continue to be statistically concentrated in a limited number of states&nbsp.including Georgia, Alabama, Virginia, Missouri, and Arizona among others.&nbsp.