The Death Penalty Has Declined, Ctd

Douthat takes stock:

I strongly agree with death penalty critics like Will Wilkinson that the general decline of capital punishment in the United States over the last three centuries is a sign of moral progress. (It’s a very good thing that we aren’t hanging people for property crimes any more.) But it seems to me that there’s a real moral difference between reducing the application of the death penalty because we’ve decided that certain uses are inherently unjust (which is what drove the decline of executions for most of American history) and eliminating its use entirely because we’ve decided that our legal system isn’t competent to implement it (which is part of what’s driving the decline of the death penalty at the moment).