Site Navigation
Search
Latest Stories
Start your day right!
Get latest updates and insights delivered to your inbox.
Top Stories
Latest news
Read More
Despite a spike in executions, public support for the death penalty is collapsing. Jury verdicts and polling reveal democracy at work.
the_burtons/Getty Images
The Spirit of Democracy Is Ending America’s Death Penalty
Dec 24, 2025
At first glance, 2025 was not a very good year for the movement to end the death penalty in the United States. The number of executions carried out this year nearly doubled from the previous year.
High-profile killings, like those of Rob Reiner and his wife, made the question of whether the person who murdered them deserves the death penalty a headline-grabbing issue. And the Trump Administration dispensed its own death penalty by bombing boats of alleged drug smugglers.
But if we look beneath the surface, we can see developments in 2025 that signal trouble for America’s death penalty. We can see signs of what I call a democratic erosion in this country’s attachment to capital punishment.
To put it another way, the death penalty is dying from the bottom up, democratically.
It has long been recognized that the death penalty and democracy are incompatible. Democracy, so the argument goes, is more than majority rule. As I have argued elsewhere, “Demands allegiance to ideals of human dignity and equality that are its animating purposes. In my view, any decision that violates those principles is incompatible with democracy….(which) demands that citizens and their government respect the inherent equal worth of each person.”
Fifty years ago, Supreme Court Justice William Brennan said, “a punishment must not be so severe as to be degrading to the dignity of human beings.” The death penalty, he wrote, treats “members of the human race as nonhumans, as objects to be toyed with and discarded….(It is) thus inconsistent with the fundamental premise…that even the vilest criminal remains a human being possessed of common human dignity.”
A long time before Brennan wrote those lines, as I explained, the philosopher John Dewey argued that democracy “Is more than a form of government: it is primarily a mode of associated living, the conjoint communicated experience…. Democracy,” he continued, ”is a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature.”
The death penalty is a betrayal of that faith.
It assumes we can know with certainty the value and worth of any human life. And when the state sentences someone to death, it claims to know that the condemned person, and no future version of that person, can be worthy of redemption. If Dewey is correct, a person cannot lose or forfeit her worth through indecent conduct or even the most reprehensible behavior.
If we look at what happened to the death penalty in 2025, it seems that Americans are coming around to that view.
The Death Penalty Information Center’s end-of-the-year report offers compelling evidence for that proposition. It acknowledges the spike in executions but points out that “Public support for the death penalty has fallen to a five-decade low (52%) and recent Gallup polling reveals that less than half of U.S. adults ages 18 through 54 now support the death penalty.”
As the DPIC notes, “Support for the death penalty…has been declining since 1994, when support reached a high of 80%. This year’s number is the lowest since 1972…. Gallup also found that 44% of Americans now oppose the death penalty — the highest level of opposition recorded since May 1966. Opposition to capital punishment has been increasing since the 1990s, and has more than tripled since 1995, when only 13% of Americans opposed the death penalty. “
Most importantly, “just 41% of people 18 to 34 years old now support the death penalty. This difference marks a significant drop in support over the past 15 years. For example, Gallup’s 2011 poll found 62% of people 30 to 49 years old and 52% of young adults 18 to 29 years old favored the death penalty.”
These findings suggest that in the future, as older people whose attachment to the death penalty may be rooted in an earlier era die, the public’s overall attachment to capital punishment is likely to weaken. As it does, political leaders will have even more room than they do today to curb or end it.
Jury verdicts offer another important indicator of the death penalty’s democratic decline in 2025. Jury service offers citizens the opportunity to make their voices heard in a direct way.
As Professor Maxwell Chibundu explains, “The jury process affords citizens an unparalleled opportunity to participate directly in the process of self-governance. In the courtroom and its precincts, an otherwise indifferent citizen is made to confront the responsibility of evaluating the conduct of her fellow citizens, familiarizing herself with the legal rules and norms of our society, gauging governmental conduct, and ultimately calling the parties to account for their conduct.”
Because juries are drawn from a cross section of the population, “the composition of the jury and its verdict are…microcosms of the larger society.” That is why what juries do helps gauge the extent and depth of popular support for the death penalty.
And what did juries in capital cases do in 2025?
As the DPIC reports, “Fewer than half of the more than 50 capital trials that reached the sentencing phase this year resulted in a death sentence. “ The total number of new death sentences was 22.
Those new death sentences were handed down in just five states. 2025 is, the DPIC says, “the fifth year in a row with fewer than 30 people sentenced to death in a single year and the eleventh year in a row with fewer than 50 new death sentences, demonstrating the growing reluctance by juries to impose death.”
It highlights the fact that “in the two states where prosecutors most often sought the death penalty, Alabama and Florida, juries were markedly reluctant to reach a sentence of death. In Alabama, only one-fifth (4/20) of death-qualified juries recommended death sentences. In Florida, half (6/12)2 of death-qualified juries recommended death sentences.”
When Americans are asked to do the work of deciding whether a particular defendant convicted of a capital crime should be executed, they are increasingly likely to say no. This is all the more significant as a way of registering democratic dissatisfaction with the death penalty because only people who have no conscientious objection to capital punishment can serve on juries. That means that opponents of the death penalty do not get to serve on capital juries.
The more that people see the death penalty up close, the less likely they are to endorse its use. That is why jury verdicts provide indicators of an erosion of the death penalty in this country, rooted in democratic practices.
Whatever their general views about it, jurors are having a harder time than ever in seeing it as an appropriate punishment, even for those who commit gruesome crimes.
Writing almost twenty years ago, the political theorist George Kateb argued that “the spirit of democracy” could not be reconciled with a “zeal“ for harsh punishment. 2025 suggests that Americans’ zeal for one form of harsh punishment, the death penalty, is waning.
There is a real prospect that this country can end it through democratic means. And our democracy will be better for it.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
Keep ReadingShow less
Recommended
As Australia bans social media for kids under 16, U.S. parents face a harder truth: online safety isn’t an individual choice; it’s a collective responsibility.
Getty Images/Keiko Iwabuchi
Parents Must Quit Infighting to Keep Kids Safe Online
Dec 24, 2025
Last week, Australia’s social media ban for children under age 16 officially took effect. It remains to be seen how this law will shape families' behavior; however, it’s at least a stand against the tech takeover of childhood. Here in the U.S., however, we're in a different boat — a consensus on what's best for kids feels much harder to come by among both lawmakers and parents.
In order to make true progress on this issue, we must resist the fallacy of parental individualism – that what you choose for your own child is up to you alone. That it’s a personal, or family, decision to allow smartphones, or certain apps, or social media. But it’s not a personal decision. The choice you make for your family and your kids affects them and their friends, their friends' siblings, their classmates, and so on. If there is no general consensus around parenting decisions when it comes to tech, all kids are affected.
According to More in Common, which recently surveyed parents in the U.S., U.K., France and Poland on their thoughts and experiences around online safety, 65% of U.S. parents are “very” concerned about their kids’ safety online, and another 28% are “somewhat” concerned (leaving 7% of parents not that concerned at all – a troubling number, even if it seems low).
And according to the researchers, deeper focus group sessions (which you can dive into by downloading the report here) showed many parents feel that other parents are undermining their ability to keep their children safe. Specifically, the researchers note that, “Differences in approaches between parents are seen as a source of tension, and a way for children to bypass the rules in their own household. This can lead to parents feeling powerless.”
Perhaps parents feel powerless because so often they are alone in this fight, given that the burden of responsibility for keeping kids safe online is lobbed squarely onto parents rather than onto the technology companies where it belongs. This is not by accident, or by default, but is a result of the democratic process failing to protect the most vulnerable among us – our children – from Big Tech. When there is no corporate accountability, the result is infighting and an inability for civil society to form a strong, united front.
We are in a divisive time in this country, politically, but we must not be divisive on this issue, and changing community norms is one of the best defenses we have right now against the risks our kids are facing. We know child sexual abuse material can be found on every platform. We know social media is problematic for a multitude of reasons for kids under 16 (and even older). The online realm, especially now that AI has exploded with essentially no guardrails and major support from the current administration, is only getting crazier and more dangerous. AI toys are the newest threat and should make every parent lose sleep at night.
Certainly not all kids are the same – what one child can handle online might be very different for the next child. And parents are the best judges of that. But let’s be real – not all parents are diligent or, as the More in Common research shows, all that concerned about the mental and physical risks posed to young people when they go online. We can be pro-tech and also pro-safety, but we have to be able to talk to each other and come to some agreement around what we, as a country, will allow for our children. But we won’t come to a consensus without first agreeing that it’s a collective problem with collective consequences.
There is legislation that will help to fight this problem and hold tech companies responsible for what happens on their platforms. And we must support this sort of policy action to get to the root cause. But as parents, the greatest power we have is our ability to come together. We must not let parental individualism get in our way of protecting our kids online.
Keep ReadingShow less
selective photo of petaled flower
Photo by raquel raq on Unsplash
Planting Hope in a Hard Season
Dec 24, 2025
In an Advent reflection penned several years ago, Anne Lamott wrote, “even as everything is dying and falling asleep…something brand new is coming. Hope is coming….swords will be beaten into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks.
“This is a little hard to buy,” she admitted, “with a world stage occupied by—well, I’m not going to name names. But setting aside one’s tiny tendency toward cynicism,…in Advent — we wait; and hope appears if we truly desire to see it….we find it where we can….”
I want us to beat our cynicism and despair into useful tools to plant and grow that hope, don’t you? My most recent glimpse was something between “The Little Engine that Could” and “David and Goliath.” It arrived in an email from the head of the United Church of Christ Climate Hope Affiliates (CHA). The first CHA chapters were started in March 2025, and by the end of the year, they had started their eleventh chapter. Talk about planting hope in a hard season.
Before I share that hopeful story, let’s remember the cracked clay we must till for hope to grow.
This month, Miami elected its first Democratic mayor in nearly 30 years. The voter turnout? Twenty-one percent. On December 9, 2025, 79 percent of Miami voters stayed home. That’s a reminder of how hard it is to engage Americans in voting, let alone the work between elections.
Against this backdrop, the eleventh and newest CHA chapter was launched in East Lansing, Michigan, on November 1. Of the 22 who attended the launch, 10 became chapter members. They began with a four-part new group training, something few organizations would ask of new volunteer advocates. (We often get as little as we ask for.) Before the four sessions were even complete, they’d secured, prepared for, and completed their first meeting with a Congressional office. Many of their friends and acquaintances said their Congressman, Rep. Tom Barrett (R-MI), was notoriously difficult to reach.
Because of alleged vandalization outside of Rep. Barrett’s office, the office was closed, and the brand-new volunteers were told they’d be informed of the meeting location only a few hours beforehand.
“I honestly wondered if we would be meeting at all,” said Pastor John Schleicher, Lutheran Bishop Emeritus, who described the experience on the CHA national webinar in December.
Some chapter members had never met with a Congressional office, so they practiced once with the CHA staff trainer and twice on their own.
“I would underline how important those practices were for all of us to be able to speak both succinctly and extemporaneously,” Schleicher said, “and to engage in ‘deep listening’. As it turned out, the Congressman’s district director was more than gracious, setting us all at ease and granting us a full hour to talk.”
Three Michigan State University students sat in on the meeting. That’s real civics training. The Congressman and his aide shared a commitment to caring for veterans, and the group expressed their gratitude for that and for Rep. Barrett’s support for solar energy as a state representative.
The aide listened carefully to the volunteers’ personal stories and to their request: full funding of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). President Trump has called for a 55% cut to the EPA.
“We spoke of our hope for an ongoing relationship with the aide,” Schleicher continued. “He responded that we could be helpful in sharing important details and nuances in shaping bills Rep. Barrett might sponsor and/or support related to environmental and caring for creation issues.”
Knowing their Representative is a devout Catholic and avid reader, they asked the aide to pass on a copy of Laudato Si, Pope Francis’ encyclical On Care for Our Common Home.
“If this first meeting sounds too good to be true,” Schleicher concluded, “it did to us, too! Our advice as newbies in this CHA approach to advocacy is to lean on your faith that God is in this non-combative approach to relationship building with elected leaders. They may not be as completely close-minded or as captive to corporate, nakedly profit-oriented influences as we think. Pray for…staff members to show up in this gentler, more Christ-like, potentially more lasting way, willing to work with you for a healthier, more just world.”
“Even as everything is dying and falling asleep” Lamott reminded us, “…something brand new is coming. Hope is coming….in Advent — we wait; and hope appears if we truly desire to see it….we find it where we can….”
I’ve found hope in the work of these newly minted volunteer advocates and in a Congressional aide who was willing to listen to them.
Sam Daley-Harris is the author of “Reclaiming Our Democracy: Every Citizen’s Guide to Transformational Advocacy” and the founder of RESULTS and Civic Courage. This is part of a series focused on better understanding transformational advocacy: citizens awakening to their power.
Keep ReadingShow less
As screens replace toys, childhood is being gamified. What this shift means for parents, play, development, and holiday gift-giving.
Getty Images, Oscar Wong
The Christmas When Toys Died: The Playtime Paradigm Shift Retailers Failed to See Coming
Dec 23, 2025
Something is changing this Christmas, and parents everywhere are feeling it. Bedrooms overflow with toys no one touches, while tablets steal the spotlight, pulling children as young as five into digital worlds that retailers are slow to recognize. The shift is quiet but unmistakable, and many parents are left wondering what toy purchases even make sense anymore.
Research shows that higher screen time correlates with significantly lower engagement in other play activities, mainly traditional, physical, unstructured play. It suggests screen-based play is displacing classic play with traditional toys. Families are experiencing in real time what experts increasingly describe as the rise of “gamified childhoods.”
Parents walk store aisles searching for something that will excite the children on Christmas morning, yet we already know the truth. The toys we select will not compete with Minecraft® or Roblox® games like Dress to Impress® and 99 Nights in the Forest®, or with other digital universes where kids spend most of their creative energy. Children care about avatars, skins, upgrades, quests, weapons, and character packs. They care about customizing their online identities, cheat codes, and unlocking features that help them advance. Dolls, trucks, and building sets simply cannot hold their attention as well as digital play does.
This year, my family donated toys twice. Not because we want to purge clutter, but because the playroom tells the whole story. Many toys from birthdays still remain unopened in the closet. Others are played with once and never touched again. Yet the moment a tablet turns on, the excitement is instant. The dopamine hits from the rewards of progressing through a game are strong. The children want Robux, Minecoins, game passes, exclusive content, and digital tools that help them explore their online worlds. It becomes clear that parents are shopping in physical toy stores for an outdated model of childhood.
Retailers are falling even further behind. Childhood culture has shifted. Merchandise tied to the digital properties kids care about barely exists. Try finding quality items connected to 99 Nights in the Forest, KPop Demon Hunters®, or many of the other games that influence children’s online experiences. You will likely walk away empty-handed. The demand is high, and the audience is loyal, yet retailers are missing a significant financial opportunity.
This disconnect leaves parents frustrated, confused, and sometimes feeling guilty. We want to give something meaningful. We want to see genuine joy on our children’s faces. Instead, we often watch them unwrap toys that end up in the donation pile by Spring Break. At the same time, many parents feel a quiet worry building. We see how deeply these games pull our children in, and we instinctively sense that this level of immersion is not always healthy. The research reflects their concerns. Some families even notice changes in mood, patience, and attention when gaming becomes the center of play. Gaming is not a slight seasonal trend. It reflects a significant cultural shift in how children imagine, learn, and socialize.
I admit I disapprove of the nature of many of these games for the children in my family, yet I see the pressure they feel because all their friends are talking about the zombie-crazed deer in 99 Nights. The adage that asks whether you would jump off a bridge if your friends did no longer works. The answer is yes, but now parents are the ones providing the safety equipment so their children can jump and land as softly as possible.
As a former teacher and an early childhood specialist, I suggest shifting the focus this holiday season to experiences as gifts. Children may not hold on to physical toys, but they remember moments. Experiences support healthy development in ways that toys sometimes cannot. Families can consider museum memberships, robotics camps, art classes, sports clinics, concerts, creative workshops, or meaningful family outings. To keep the magic of unwrapping alive, parents can place a small related gift under the tree, such as a child-friendly camera for a year of museum visits, a nature explorer kit for an outdoor program, or art supplies that introduce an upcoming class.
Christmas feels different now, but it also offers an opportunity. I am mourning the decline of traditional toys, but parents can use this season to rethink how we protect, connect, and support our children in an evolving world.
The playtime paradigm shift is already here.
Janice Robinson-Celeste is a former educator and the founder of Successful Black Parenting Magazine, a multi-award-winning publication that empowers Black families. She is a Public Voices fellow of the OpEd Project in partnership with the National Black Child Development Institute.
Keep ReadingShow less
Load More