It has been twenty years since Gary Gilmore said "let's do it" to a Utah firing squad, in effect opening a new a era of the death penalty. While public support for the penalty remains high, a growing understanding of the reality of its application -- particularly where prosecutors conceal or remove vital information -- has some people changing their minds. Michael Kroll is an associate editor for PNS specializing in criminal justice issues.

Maybe it's because the crime rate is going down.

Maybe it's because of publicity about judicial mistakes that have seen 21 condemned prisoners released from death rows across the country in the past four years alone.

Maybe it's the impact of movies like "Dead Man Walking" and TV magazine shows on the issue.

Maybe it's just the swing of history's pendulum.

Whatever the cause, there are clear signs that the near-monolithic support for capital punishment in this country is beginning to crack.

The most obvious indicator of a shift appears in public opinion polls. California's Field Poll this February found that support for the death penalty in the state has declined from 83 percent in 1985 to 74 percent today. Some 20 percent now say they are opposed to the penalty, compared to about 13 percent in the mid-1980s.

Since Gary Gilmore said "Let's do it" to Utah firing squad in 1977, we have had twenty years of experience in applying the death penalty. And there are signs, in addition to polling data, that this experience may have weakened support for the death penalty in practice if not in theory.

The American Bar Association has adopted a resolution seeking an immediate halt to executions in the United States because the process is so clearly inequitable and unfair.

On the world stage, the UN Commission on Human Rights called on all countries which have the death penalty to suspend it as a step toward complete abolition. And the European Parliament voted to condemn Russia and Ukraine -- the first stage in a process that could end in expulsion -- for violating the commitment to suspend executions, a prerequisite for membership in the Council of Europe.

A recent report from the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington DC, described the cases of some 70 condemned but innocent prisoners released from death row since 1973. In many cases, officials subverted justice by hiding evidence, relying on perjured testimony offered by jailhouse informants in exchange for lenient treatment, and otherwise manipulating the system.

The question of executing the innocent took center stage last month in California in the case of Thomas Thompson, whose execution was put off at the last minute when the court agreed there were substantial questions about his conviction.

Similar cases have cropped up in state after state.

• Illinois -- Rolando Cruz freed after 10 years on death row, twice sentenced to die for a murder his prosecutors knew he did not commit.

• Oklahoma -- Adolph Munson acquitted after nearly a decade on death row when officials deliberately withheld evidence of his innocence.

• Maryland -- Kirk Bloodworth released after nine years in prison, when DNA evidence established his innocence.

• Alabama -- Walter McMillian let go after six years on death row when evidence of his innocence -- withheld by the state -- surfaced.

• Texas -- Federico Martinez-Macias found innocent and set free after 9 years on death row.

In New Mexico, Ohio, Georgia, Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, Arizona, such cases have taken toll on public support for the death penalty.

When the state conceals evidence in order to get a death sentence, it damages our view of ourselves as a fundamentally fair people. Most Americans would support the principle set out by the Supreme Court in 1977: "Capital punishment must be imposed fairly, and with reasonable consistency, or not at all." The steady stream of examples of unfairness in the way the penalty is applied has begun to wear down public support.

In this regard, the people may be following in the footsteps of former Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun. Although he voted for the death penalty, the unfairness finally wore him down. In 1994, he wrote,

"From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than twenty years I have endeavored -- indeed, I have struggled -- along with a majority of this Court to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Despite the effort ... the death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice, and mistake .... I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. "