Despite Perry's unthinking support of executions, Toobin claims that capital punishment is on the way out:
[T]he death penalty is withering, even in Texas. In the nineteen-nineties, juries in the United States handed down about three hundred death sentences per year; in 2010 there were only a hundred and fourteen. There were ninety-eight executions in 1999 and only forty-six last year. Earlier this year, Illinois became the sixteenth state to ban executions, and death sentences are down dramatically even in Perry’s own state.
Alyssa Rosenberg recommends the Cameron Todd Willingham documentary. Trailer above.
The Dish 