Opposition to the death penalty nationwide has grown to it highest percentage in the last forty years.
Two issues are troubling former proponents of capital punishment:
1. Miscarriages of Justice
2. The cost of meting out a punishment which does not bear scrutiny of deterring future crime.
Proponents argue that if the appellate process were streamlined and shortened, with swifter judgments are rapid retribution, then the death penalty would be an effective deterrent.
This exigence runs in the face of mounting evidence and troubling allegations that more capital cases are pillorying an innocent man for a heinous crime. Without proper due process, the likelihood of the wrong person being tried, convicted, and executed is too great. Reeling from the conviction that an innocent man had been wrongly convicted and executed, the people of the state of Michigan did not want to take the chance on another person dying for another miscreant's evil deed, so they voted for the immediate abolition of the death penalty.
Michigan was the first state to abolish capital punishment, as far back as 1854. Steadily, more states have also done away with execution, opting for life in prison without the possibility of parole as a safer, more just, and lost costly alternative.
Perhaps with the severe decline in state revenues, which will compromise the execution of justice in underfunded courts yielding questionable verdicts, more states will join in abolishing capital punishment once and for all in the United States of America.
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