Congratulations, Massachusetts!

Huge kudos to the Massachusetts House of Representatives which on Tuesday voted down a bill introduced by Governor Mitt Romney that sought to re-introduce the death penalty into the state.
The vote was 99 to 53.
Romney claimed that the bill he introduced had mandated so many safeguards that it would, “[take] out the risk of executing someone who is innocent, and it does put in place the ultimate penalty for those who carry out the most horrible crimes in society.” A majority of legislators disagreed.
State Representative Eugene L. O’Flaherty, Democrat of Boston, was quoted as saying, “No system that relies on scientific evidence can truly be developed that flawlessly and with no doubt separates the guilty from the innocent.” Other death-penalty opponents noted that the death penalty,

was unfairly applied to the poor and to members of racial minorities, that it was too expensive and that it ran counter to the trend in which increasing numbers of countries have abolished capital punishment.

Quite right.
My home state of Virginia, meanwhile, remains one of the killingest states in the Union. I think we have two executions coming up: one for Robin Lovitt on November 30, and one for Daryl Atkins on December 2.
Massachusetts last executed someone in 1947.
The chart on this web-page from the Death Penalty Information Center seems to show that the death penalty is very much “a southern thang”… The sixteen named “southern” states there– yes, that includes Virginia– have accounted for roughly 80% of all the country’s executions since 1993.
As you can learn here, twleve states and the District of Columbia do not have the death penalty in their penal codes; 38 states plus the federal government do have it.
This disparity allows for some interesting comparisons. For example, regarding the alleged “deterrent” capacity of the death penalty. If you go to the table around 2/3 way down this web-page from the DPIC, on the left, you can see that:

in 2003, the murder-rate in DP states was 44% higher than in non-DP states;*
in 2002, the murder-rate in DP states was 36% higher than in non-DP states;
in 2001, the murder-rate in DP states was 37% higher than in non-DP states; etc…

So why, oh why, do we do it? This truly feels like a medieval country sometimes.
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*In an earlier version of this post I wrote these facts exactly the wrong way around. Oops, sorry about that. ~HC