Sid Salter
- The death penalty is neither clean, easy, nor painless — it is the deliberate decision of the taxpayers to take the life of an individual as punishment for their crimes.
The enduring myths about the death penalty in America are that the practice is supported by Republicans and opposed by Democrats, that Blacks strongly oppose the punishment and, in contrast, Whites support it, and that the death penalty is a highly partisan issue.
A new Pew Research Center study produced some surprising data on those questions, data that is relevant in death penalty states like Mississippi.
Pew researchers found that 66% of Americans favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder while 32% oppose it. In the same survey, 59% of respondents said the death penalty “does not deter people from committing serious crimes,” while 39% believed that the death penalty is a crime deterrent.
The research indicated that support for the death penalty is 6% higher than it was five years ago. The Pew Research Center surveyed 3,554 U.S. adults between July 6 – 12 of this year.
In the survey, Pew reported that 73% of respondents say there is some risk an innocent person would be executed, while only 25 % believed there are adequate safeguards to prevent that from happening.
For Mississippi, with the nation’s highest percentage Black population, it is notable that 49% of those surveyed said: “Blacks are more likely than White people to be sentenced to death for committing similar crimes, but 48% say this is not the case.”
The partisan split shows that 84% of Republicans and voters who lean Republican support the death penalty. In comparison, 51% of Democrats and those who lean Democrat support the punishment, and 48% oppose the practice.
The widest ideological chasm on the death penalty came over questions of fairness. Some 77% of Republicans said, “White and Black people are equally likely to be sentenced to death for similar crimes,” while only 23% of Democrats shared that view.
Mississippi currently has 35 inmates on Death Row, 34 men and one woman. Of those inmates, 23 (65.5%) are Black, 10 (28.6%) are White, 1 (2.9%) is Hispanic, and 1 (2.9%) is Asian/Pacific Islander.
The last Mississippi Death Row inmate to be executed was Charles Ray Crawford on Oct. 15, 2025. Crawford was executed by lethal injection for the 1993 kidnapping, rape and murder of Kristy Ray, 20, of Tippah County. Crawford had a prior rape conviction as well as other violent crimes.
The pace of executions in Mississippi has slowed due to the lengthy federal and state appeals process, post-conviction litigation, mental health and competency challenges, and legal disputes over execution methods and protocols.
Chemicals used in lethal injections have been particularly frequent targets of litigation and business protests to the point that several companies have stopped producing or selling the materials. State legislatures have in recent years broadened execution methods available to state officials as a means of bypassing chemical shortages.
Mississippi currently allows executions by lethal injection, nitrogen hypoxia, electrocution, or firing squad.
There is also the very real question of racial and economic disparities. As I have written before, there are valid objections to the death penalty — the moral argument, the fairness argument, and the due process argument. As a journalist, I covered crime from the actual crime scenes to the courts to the execution chamber at Parchman — and the extreme outlier is seeing monied inmates who could afford private attorneys executed at the same rate as indigent inmates who relied on court-appointed counsel.
But the notion that in venues where the voters embrace use of the death penalty there is some magic execution method in which inmates are guaranteed not to experience pain is a fool’s errand. The death penalty is neither clean, easy, nor painless — it is the deliberate decision of the taxpayers to take the life of an individual as punishment for their crimes.
Death Row never was and never will be a place free from pain and a degree of chaos. That is the nature of the capital punishment beast. The only way to change that is to either get out of the capital punishment business or stop trying vainly to sanitize that process.
