The day before Thanksgiving, at a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden,
President Obama officially "pardoned" two turkeys, sparing them from the
chopping block and sending them to live out their days in Disneyland. This is
one of those uniquely American traditions that must have our foreign friends
scratching their heads. What can you say about a country where turkeys receive
a presidential reprieve, while more than 3,000 human beings are awaiting death
at the hands of the state?

Compare the White House turkeys' experience to Romell Broom's. On September 15
the state of Ohio tried to execute Broom by lethal injection - and failed.
Prison staff struggled for more than two hours to find a vein for the needle
that would deliver the deadly chemicals to stop his heart. They stuck him at
least 18 times, painfully striking muscle and bone. At one point Broom covered
his face with his hands and cried. Governor Ted Strickland finally ordered the
execution postponed, and a federal appeals court later stayed another Ohio
execution pending investigation of what it called the "disturbing issues"
raised by this incident. But the state still wants to try again to kill Broom.

The United States is one of very few democracies to retain the death penalty.
All of our closest allies - Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France -
abolished it decades ago. And it's not just a little-used provision in US law;
last year, the United States was the world's fourth-leading executioner, just
behind the repressive governments of China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. There have
been 48 executions in the United States so far this year, and nearly 1,200
since the start of the modern death penalty era in 1977.

The vast majority of the nearly 3,300 persons under sentence of death in the
United States are on state death rows, so President Obama has no direct
authority to commute their sentences. But he could use his office as a bully
pulpit to urge states to abolish capital punishment, as New Jersey and New
Mexico have done in the past two years. Unfortunately, that's not going to
happen. President Obama supports the death penalty, writing in his 2006 book
The Audacity of Hope that some crimes call for "the ultimate punishment." On
the campaign trail in 2008 he went further, strongly denouncing a Supreme
Court decision that invalidated the death penalty for rape and other
non-homicide crimes.

Despite this disappointing lack of presidential leadership, there are signs of
waning public support for the death penalty. The number of new death sentences
imposed each year has fallen to about one-third the peak level of the
mid-1990s. The exoneration of more than 130 death row prisoners since 1973 has
created significant doubt about the reliability of the death penalty system.
And at a time when yawning budget deficits are forcing deep cuts in basic
government services, the enormous expense of capital punishment seems harder
to justify. A 2008 study by a California state commission concluded that the
state could save more than $120 million annually by abolishing the death
penalty and replacing it with life in prison without possibility of parole.

It has taken many years for the world to turn its back on the death penalty,
leaving the United States as one of the last holdouts. Here in the United
States, progress has similarly been incremental, slow but steady. It won't
happen tomorrow, but with luck, we'll eventually see the day when human beings
receive as much mercy and compassion as White House turkeys.