The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty By Maurice Chammah In 1972, the Supreme Court meted out a death sentence. The condemned was the death penalty itself. The American apparatus of state killing was effectively shut down, the punishment judged too final given the flawed human beings who gave it. But this death wasnât final. A bipartisan band of bloodlust resurrected the death penalty, needling the annual count back up to a peak of 98 executions in 1999. From there, the death penalty began again to die. This time, it wasnât a high edict that doomed it, but the unsung, helter-skelter, hydra-headed, revolution-by-a-thousand-cuts process through which real change often comes.