Turn to page 17 and read the story of two young brothers, Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, who were convicted and sentenced to death in North Carolina in 1984. They would serve decades in prison before DNA tests proved their innocence. Due to the brutality of the murder that they were convicted of, their case was held out as a poster-child for why the death penalty was needed. Now their case symbolizes everything that goes wrong with our death penalty: flimsy evidence, coerced confessions, botched forensics, an overreaching prosecutor, pointless appeals, and slow justice. Their tragic story is unforgettable. But cases like theirs explain why the death penalty is now at the end of its rope.You can also turn to page 59 and compare a more recent North Carolina death penalty trial, from 2010. There the jury heard the case of a man charged with five homicides at the same time, more than any other person in the state’s history. The jury heard substantial evidence about the defendant’s “sadistic and ritualized” abuse throughout his childhood. The jury chose a life sentence.And turn to page 5 to look at an image displaying the decline in death sentences in America. You will see how from several hundred death sentences a year in the 1990s, we now have just a few dozen per year. Death sentences have come crashing down.We are all in it together, when we impose punishment on criminals. Our justice system affects our entire society, for good and ill. When innocent people are sent to death row, that injustice implicates us all. When a person is punished despite manifest mental illness; when a person gets a severe sentence because the lawyer appointed by the judge was incompetent; that is on us, too.All of those problems that have plagued American criminal justice––flawed evidence, shoddy lawyering, neglect of mental health issues, prosecution overreaching––are all magnified in death penalty cases. Yet, despite those persistent problems, we have all but ended the American death penalty. Hard working lawyers learned how to make the case for mercy to jurors. As crime fell, attitudes towards severe punishment changed. Prosecutors relaxed their punitive muscles and realized that death sentences are costly, rarely result in executions, and are biased.Although some politicians are trying to pound the tough-on-crime drums again, the death penalty decline shows how costly and pointless over-punishment can be. It mostly affects racial minorities and those who cannot afford Dream Team lawyers. The American death penalty decline points the way to a sane criminal justice system––one that treats the mentally ill, respects victims, avoids targeting the innocent, provides decent lawyers, and imposes punishment carefully and fairly.