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Though there are more U.S. capital-punishment states today than at the low point of 1917, capital punishment is waning in practice in the U.S. as it is in Western Europe. During the 1930s, civil executions in the U.S. averaged 167 a year; during the 1950s, the average was down to 72. Last year only 49 civil executions were carried out in the U.S., one more than the alltime low recorded in 1958. Women are virtually exempted from the death penalty: not one was executed in the U.S. in 1958 or 1959, and only 31 have been executed over the past three decades (29 for murder, one for kidnaping, one for treason).
There are six capital crimes under federal law (murder, rape, bank robbery, kidnaping, treason, espionage) and some 30 under state laws (e.g., aiding a suicide in Arkansas or burning a railway bridge in Georgia), but in practice the death penalty is seldom carried out in the U.S. for offenses other than 1) murder and 2)rape committed by a Negro in the South. Of the 97 men executed in the U.S., in 1958-59 under state laws, 81 were convicted of murder, 15 of rape (14 Negroes, one white, all in Southern states), and one of armed robbery (a Negro, in Texas).
If opponents of capital punishment were patient enough, they could just sit back and wait for it to fade away—in practice, if not on the statute books. But abolitionists try to hasten that fadeaway by argument.
The traditional vocabulary of debate about capital punishment is sprinkled with such terms as "sanctity of life" and "retribution," and "moral law" and "natural right," but they have largely disappeared from the debate during the past decade or so. Mainly among clergymen is the capital-punishment issue argued on moral-religious grounds. The Roman Catholic Church defends society's right to take a criminal's life as an act of collective self-defense, and a spokesman of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod says that "the Bible seems to permit the possibility of capital punishment." Several of the other religious groups in the U.S. have taken stands against capital punishment: the Methodist Church, the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., the Protestant Episcopal Church, the American Baptist Convention, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations.
Among laymen, the arguments tend to be utilitarian. Psychology is nibbling at the fringes of the law to raise the question of whether any murderer can be classified as sane. But most debate turns on the question of whether capital punishment has a deterrent effect on crime. Many defenders of capital punishment tend to agree with James Pike, Protestant Episcopal bishop of California, that "the possibility of deterrence provides the only viable, moral justification" for the death penalty.