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Much of the concern focused on racial disparities: African-Americans were sentenced to death far more frequently than whites convicted on similar charges. The legal battle was headed by the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, which scored a victory in 1972 with the Supreme Court decision in Furman v. Georgia. By a 5-4 margin, the Court invalidated the capital punishment statutes of every state. According to the justices who cast the pivotal votes, the problem was that some defendants were executed for crimes for which others received only prison sentences. Capital punishment was "so wantonly and so freakishly imposed" that it was an arbitrary and therefore unconstitutional form of punishment.16

The justices clearly implied that the death penalty would be constitutional if it were imposed in a less capricious manner. States set about drafting new laws that detailed in advance which particular types of murder cases—such as those committed during the commission of another felony—warranted a capital sentence. The Supreme Court upheld such laws in 1976, and by the late 1970s a new era of American executions had begun.17

The new laws did not end the arbitrariness of capital punishment. The decision as to whether to seek a death penalty in a particular case often had less to do with the "aggravating circumstances" of the crime than with whether the prosecutor was up for reelection soon. Although African-Americans were no longer sentenced to death at higher rates than whites, a different racial disparity emerged: A murderer was much more likely to be sentenced to death if his victim was white rather than black. Despite many instances of prisoners being released from death row after having been proven innocent, a majority of Americans continued to support capital punishment. By 2000, more than 3,000 convicted criminals were sentenced to death each year, the most since the Justice Department began keeping statistics in the 1950s.18

The situation in the United States stood in stark contrast to that in Great Britain, West Germany, Austria, Italy, Australia, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Mexico, which by the end of the 1960s had stopped executing criminals. In 2001 China led the world in executions, followed by Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United States.19

The United States followed a path so different from its peers for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that the homicide rate in America was higher than that in any other Western nation. Another fact distinguished the U.S. case: It was the only Western nation to experiment with scientific methods of capital punishment. In the early 1950s a British royal commission conducted a systematic study of execution methods and concluded that hanging should be retained. In the commission's view, there was no solid evidence that either electrocution or the gas chamber was more humane than the gallows. Germany also had considered scientific methods but decided to keep using the guillotine and the ax, a decision that resulted not from a dispassionate assessment of available options but from an "ingrained, almost mystical prejudice" in favor of the traditional methods. The nations of western Europe stayed with nineteenth-century methods of execution until they abolished the death penalty after World War II. In the United States—where a mystical prejudice favored the embrace of the new—scientific methods made executions more palatable. Americans reassured themselves that killing was a legitimate state function, so long as it was done gently.20

When executions resumed in the late 1970s, states began to abandon their electric chairs and gas chambers and to execute criminals with hypodermic injections of drugs. First adopted by Texas and Oklahoma in 1977, lethal injection swept the country far more quickly than either electrocution or the gas chamber had. State after state made the switch, with a few offering condemned prisoners a choice between the needle and the chair. Although problems with lethal injection did occur,