Cruel and more unusual

IN sentencing a convicted killer to death for the first time since 1939, the state of New Hampshire last week departed not just from its own history, but from national trends. The condemned man, Michael Addison, is a reputed gang member who was convicted of killing a Manchester police officer in a shootout - just the kind of crime the New Hampshire death penalty statute is intended to address. But what the US Supreme Court has called "evolving standards of decency" point to the eventual abolition of capital punishment, not its revival.

According to the annual report of the Death Penalty Information Center, 37 people were executed in 2008, a 14-year low, and nearly half the executions were confined to one state: Texas. Fewer death sentences were meted out this year than at any time in three decades.

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court upheld the use of lethal injection as a means to execute the condemned, raising fears that a flood of executions would follow. It has not. Since the 1990s, every region of the country has seen a decline in the annual number of death sentences handed down.

Capital punishment is not a deterrent. States with the death penalty consistently have higher murder rates than those without; in 2007 the gap was 42 percent. Its uneven application to poor convicts who cannot afford private lawyers, the increasing number of exonerations of death row inmates (four more were cleared in 2008), and the arbitrary nature of an irrevocable sentence that differs from state to state all support claims that it violates the protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

Life in prison with no possibility of parole is increasingly a more acceptable path to justice, even for a cop killer like Addison.