Hi, I'm Alyssa Molano, and this is Sorry Not Sorry.

Despite the push for federal executions in the last days of the Trump regime, there is huge momentum for the elimination of the death penalty in America.

Maurice Shema joins me this week to discuss the state of capital punishment, what it means for America and his new book on the subject, Let the Lord sword them, the rise and fall of the death penalty.

Russian author Piodoro Dostoevsky said you can judge a society by how well it treats its prisoners. Indian statesman Mahatma Gandhi said, a nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.

We look further at the unprecedented five federal executions, President Trump's Justice Department is scheduled before inauguration day.

Virginia is sent to become the first state in the South to ban the death penalty. The general assembly there officially passed the bill on Monday, it now heads to Virginia Governor Ralph Norfolk, who has already said that he would sign it into law.

That means 28 countries that still use capital punishment, and one of them of course is the US. That's awesome.

I'm Maurice Shema, and I want people to understand the impact of the death penalty and take ownership of the criminal justice system as citizens and voters. Sorry, not sorry.

Maurice, thank you so much for being with us. I think the best place to start this interview is to ask the question, how does America compare with the rest of the world when it comes to executions?

America is sort of out of step with Europe and Canada and many countries that we consider ourselves comparable to in other ways.

When you think about the countries that tend to carry out executions, it tends to be countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, and not countries that the US is typically put in a category with.

There's a couple of other democracies, notably Japan, that have continued to carry out the death penalty, but it really does put America in a sort of category all its own.

What do you think that says about us as people?

Well, I think that it says that we have a very particular history that we have not really fully reckoned with.

One of the things I explore in the book is the relationship between the contemporary death penalty and the history of lynchings, the history of racial injustice that followed the Civil War and dominated the Jim Cross South.

A lot of those states, including Texas, that were part of the Jim Cross South, are still the epicenter of the death penalty and the racial dynamics of who gets sentenced to death are still very troubling.

And so I think that Americans have a very unique relationship to the death penalty that they have not fully understood and the book is an attempt to try to start to unpack that.

It's crazy that there was a Gallup poll that came out in late 2020 that showed support for the death penalty is at its lowest level since the 1960s, but still more than half of those surveyed were in favor of it.

I mean, why is it so popular?

Well, I think that it's worth drawing a line between the death penalty and the abstract and the death penalty's actual reality.

So Americans typically at least 50% have said that they support the death penalty. Sometimes that number has gotten up to 60, 70%.

But when it comes to individual cases, Americans serve on juries, they elect district attorneys. And over the last 20 years or so, the death penalty has been in tremendous decline.

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