We’re a country with 330 million people and more than 15,000 murders and non-negligent manslaughters per year. In 2018, we executed . . . 25 people, 13 of them in Texas. The preliminary tally for 2019 is 22. Aside from a court-imposed moratorium that lasted from the late ’60s to the late ’70s, and the two decades we spent making up for lost time thereafter, the trend has been downward since the Great Depression…

Basically, every aspect of the death penalty is looking anemic. It takes longer to kill criminals than it used to: The “average elapsed time from sentencing to execution almost tripled from 1988 (6.7 years) to 2018 (19.8 years),” according to the BJS. And more prisoners are being removed from death row by other means than are being executed: As mentioned above, 25 were put to death in 2018; meanwhile, 64 had their death sentences revoked through various channels (commutations, courts overturning laws or convictions, etc.), and another 24 died in ways besides execution.