Examines two increasingly important factors in the debate over state execution, the conjunction of which may well signal an end to the death penalty in the United States.

The fact that a significant number of those whose lives the state ends are not only selected on arbitrary and discriminatory grounds, but are also innocent of the crime for which they are being punished, only intensifies the gravity of the abuse of state power that the American death penalty represents. The authors argue that domestic disquiet over a system that gets it wrong all too frequently is combining with the international critique of the death penalty as a human rights violation to bring an end to America's death penalty.