Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore refused all appeals and insisted on being executed in 1977, becoming the first US prisoner put to death after the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment six months earlier.
A career criminal who shot two clerks to death during a robbery spree in Utah, Gilmore chose a firing squad over hanging and became a central figure in one of the great debates about the US criminal justice system.
Surging US crime rates in the 1970s and 1980s created massive popular support for capital punishment. Use of the death penalty has declined in recent years, but it reached a grim landmark on Friday with the 1,000th execution since the moratorium was lifted in 1976.
Kenneth Lee Boyd, 57, died by lethal injection in a Raleigh, North Carolina, prison for killing his estranged wife and her father in 1988 while his two children watched. He was convicted in a 1994 retrial.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1972 in a Georgia case that the death penalty as applied at the time violated the US constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Because of mounting legal challenges, it had already been six years since the last execution.
In 1976, the court reinstated the capital punishment option with revised state laws, which govern nearly all murder cases. Lethal injection has become the preferred execution method in most states.
Death penalty critics argue that execution wipes out a prisoner's chance of exoneration if new evidence turns up later, and point to the disproportionate number of US blacks on death row.
Rick Halperin, president of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and chairman of Amnesty International USA, cited racial and economic fairness as one of many grounds to scrap executions.
"One of the main reasons, of course, is the fact that it is not a foolproof system and that innocent people can be executed," he said.
Since 1971, 122 prisoners have been freed from death row.
"Many people are troubled by so many people being sentenced to death and then later being proven innocent," Halperin said.
"Another reason why people are moving is that they are realizing that life without parole is a viable option," he added.
Halperin said he believes there are at least three cases of overwhelming evidence that innocent people were executed. DNA evidence is now being tested that could prove the innocence of one Virginia inmate who was put to death, he said.
Evidence also was the key issue in the case of a Virginia man who escaped execution on Wednesday.
Robin Lovitt was convicted of killing a billiard-hall employee with a pair of scissors during a 1998 robbery, but denied the killing.
A court employee mistakenly threw away possible DNA evidence -- including the scissors -- before Lovitt had exhausted legal appeals, prompting Governor Mark Warner to commute his sentence to life in prison.
Of the 50 US states, 33 now allow the death penalty. Last year, 59 people were executed in the US, led by Texas' 23.
Yet recent surveys show that US public support for the death penalty has declined.
In October, a poll showed that 64 percent of Americans favor it, the lowest support since the executions resumed and down significantly from 80 percent in 1994.
Race, inequalities in the judicial system and the growing number of inmates proven innocent by DNA testing have increasingly become part of the debate.
In 2002, the US Supreme Court ruled that the mentally retarded could not be executed. This year, a court ruling made it illegal to execute offenders who were minors when they committed their offenses.
The Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center reported that the annual number of executions has declined by 40 percent since the late 1990s, along with an even sharper drop in the rate of courts' sentencing convicts to death.
Halperin said he believes a reversal of the nation's 1976 decision is inevitable.
"It is no longer a case of if, but a case of when," he said.
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