Oklahoma executed a former grocery store stocker found guilty of killing a 10-year-old girl in 2006 Thursday morning, marking the country’s last execution of 2024.
Kevin Ray Underwood’s bid for clemency in the killing of his young neighbor Jamie Rose Bolin last week was unanimously denied by the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board, leading to his execution by lethal injection on his 45th birthday. Despite being expected, the decision was noteworthy: the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center reports that this year is the first time since 2016 that no state has granted mercy to a person who has been given a death sentence.
According to the Center’s annual report on death sentences and execution trends, which was released Thursday, the use of the death penalty has expanded this year amid a crucial political moment for President Joe Biden, who last week granted the most clemencies and commutes for nonviolent offenders in a single day. Before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, a group of opponents of the death penalty has written to him pleading with him to commute the sentences of all 40 federal death row convicts.
Trump has stated that he would increase the use of the federal death sentence, while Biden, who ran on a platform of abolishing it, had a moratorium in place during his administration.
According to Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, “President Biden is the center of attention right now.”
“The commutation issue is not necessarily whether you think the death penalty is a good thing or a bad thing,” she stated. “You can support the death penalty but have serious issues with the ways these men were sentenced to death, some during a time of superheated political and overzealous prosecutorial policies.”
The death penalty has not decreased in a few states—Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas—that carried out the majority of the 25 executions in 2024, despite a recent Gallup poll showing that national support for the death penalty has dropped to its lowest level in decades, largely due to changing attitudes among millennials and Gen Z.
According to the Death sentence Information Center, Alabama prisoner Alan Eugene Miller became the 1,600th person executed in the United States since the death sentence was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976, marking a significant milestone for the death penalty.
Miller, a former delivery driver convicted of a workplace shooting spree in 2000, was one of three prisoners executed by Alabama this year utilizing the new technique of nitrogen gas.
As manufacturers place limitations on enabling their products to be used in executions, several states that have implemented the death sentence have found it difficult to get lethal injection medications in recent years. However, in 2024, some Following South Carolina and Utah, both of which executed people for the first time in more than ten years, Indiana executed its first prisoner in fifteen years on Wednesday.In February, Idaho also made an attempt at its first execution in twelve years, but it was stopped after prison officials failed to find a viable vein.
Other states, such as Arizona, which hasn’t carried out an execution since 2022 after Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs started a review, and Louisiana, which hasn’t carried out an execution since 2010, have also announced plans to dust off their death chambers.
The Democratic attorney general of Arizona, Kris Mayes, announced this month that her office would once again pursue a death warrant against a prisoner involved in a murder in 2002: “This is not a decision that I have made lightly, but the death penalty is the law in our state, and it is my job to uphold it.”
It would be “justice” for Ted Price, the victim who was killed in a domestic conflict, she said.
After Underwood’s bid for mercy was denied by the state pardon board, Gentner Drummond, the Republican attorney general for Oklahoma, reiterated that the death sentence is intended to provide closure to the loved ones of victims.
In a statement, Drummond called Underwood a “evil monster” and said, “Jamie’s family has waited 18 agonizing years for justice that will finally be carried out when this murderer is executed.”
However, Gentner has also shown that officials may find nuance in the broader debate over the death penalty by not solely siding against death row inmates.
Gentner made the uncommon choice to appear in support of a convicted prisoner in the well-known case of Richard Glossip, whose 2004 murder conviction in a 1997 murder-for-hire scheme was reviewed this year by the U.S. Supreme Court following claims of innocence. According to a brief made by Gentner, “justice would not be served by moving forward with a capital sentence that the State can no longer defend because of prosecutorial misconduct and cumulative error.”
Whether Glossip, whose execution dates have been set nine times over the years, deserves a fresh trial has not yet been decided by the Supreme Court.
Since only 10 of the 27 states that currently have the death penalty in place condemned people to death this year, and nine of those states actually carried out executions, Maher emphasized that the current issue is far more localized than it was in previous years.
“It’s no longer a story about how America uses the death penalty,” she stated. “It’s a story about how a very few number of states use the death penalty, and even within states, it’s certain counties that are imposing use of the death penalty.”
The goal of Robert Dunham’s independent research program, the Death Penalty Policy Project, was to determine whether the death penalty can deter crime in states that still carry out executions as opposed to those that have abolished it or implemented moratoriums.
According to Dunham’s study, which was released last month, states that have never used the death penalty have the lowest murder rates. However, “moreover, the states that are now most actively carrying out executions are among the least safe for the public and the most dangerous for police,” he concluded after examining more than thirty years’ worth of FBI homicide data.
Dunham claimed that the death sentence “has become a pointless exercise in cruelty.”
This month, in a state that hasn’t carried out an execution in six years, Dunham gave testimony before a legislative committee in Ohio that is debating whether to eliminate the capital sentence. Additionally, prosecutors acknowledged that major offenses still warrant the death penalty.
Saleh Awadallah, an assistant prosecuting attorney in Cuyahoga County, stated that “if the death penalty is abolished, the next movement will be to eliminate life without parole as a sentencing option.” He added that “Ohioans have time and time again supported capital punishment for serial killers, mass murderers, and child killers.”
But according to Cassandra Stubbs, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Capital Punishment Project, racial disparities in who is sentenced to death and executed, as well as the persistent doubts about the innocence of some people who are executed, have already tainted the death penalty process.
She cites bipartisan initiatives in Texas and Oklahoma as instances of reexamination of the death penalty’s effects. Some jurisdictions’ usage of it “very much feels like these are last gasp efforts,” according to Stubbs.
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