The Opinion Video above is the final episode in a series of three videos that take a stand against the death penalty in the United States. It features Charles Don Flores, who has been on death row in Texas since 1999, awaiting execution for a murder he insists he didn’t commit. That is where we met and filmed him.
The videos are in keeping with the editorial board’s longstanding position that the death penalty is full of bias and error, morally abhorrent, futile in deterring crime and should be abolished.
The series lands at a hopeful but still challenging time in the movement to get rid of capital punishment in the United States.
The death penalty has gradually been falling out of favor with officials and the broader public alike over the past three decades, in part owing to what the Death Penalty Information Center called “society’s greater understanding about the fallibility of our legal system and its inability to protect innocent people from execution.”
The number of states that have rejected capital punishment has increased steadily since the late 1990s. Twenty-nine states have now either abolished the death penalty or have paused executions by executive action, up from 12 states in 1999.
Last year, for the first time, a Gallup poll found that more Americans believe the death penalty is administered unfairly than fairly (50 percent versus 47 percent). And the percentage of people who support the death penalty has fallen steadily since the mid-1990s, according to Gallup, dropping to 53 percent this year, a five-decade low.
But other recent data urgently underscores how much hard work remains for abolitionists. The downward trend in the number of executions that prevailed for two decades — there were 11 in 2021, way down from the peak of 98 in 1999 — has recently reversed. There were 18 executions in 2022 and another 24 last year, a worrisome uptick driven in part by governors and prosecutors seeking to burnish their crime-fighting bona fides.
And there are still about 2,400 prisoners sitting on death row around the United States, awaiting execution.
Among them is Charles Don Flores, who was found guilty of killing a woman in Farmers Branch, Texas, in a drug-related home invasion.
His legal team plans to file a last-ditch request for a new trial, but it’s a long shot. Still, Flores’s request is plain: “Give me a fair shot.”
The case against him hinged on an investigative technique that is now prohibited in Texas. Yet because of it, Flores may soon die.
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