Your mother is kidnapped from her home and brutally murdered, her body dumped in the woods off a quiet country road. The authorities find a suspect, tell you they’re going to seek the death penalty and ask you if you’re OK with that. How would you react? What would you do?
Brett Malone found himself in that very position when his mother, Mary Ann, was killed in 2000, and the Opinion video above is about the surprising path his life has taken since then.
The film is the second in a three-part series, with each taking a critical view of the death penalty by exposing flaws in cases and questioning whether retributive justice can truly provide closure. The videos are in keeping with The Times’s longstanding position that the punishment is full of bias and error, morally abhorrent and 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 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 been increasing since the late 1990s. Twenty-nine states have abolished the death penalty or paused executions by executive action — up from 12 in 1999.
Last year, for the first time, a Gallup poll found that more Americans said the death penalty is administered unfairly (50 percent) than fairly (47 percent). And the percentage of people who said they supported 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. A downward trend in the number of executions that prevailed for two decades — there were 11 in 2021, down from a peak of 98 in 1999 — has recently reversed. There were 18 executions in 2022 and 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.
One of them is Jeremiah Manning, the man who killed Brett Malone’s mother. The two men have never met, but since her death, their lives — and their fates — have been deeply intertwined.
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