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NEW YORK - "Let's do it."
With those last words, convicted killer Gary Gilmore ushered in the modern era of capital punishment in the United States, an age of death chambers that will likely see its 1,000th execution in the coming days.
After a 10-year ban, Gilmore in 1977 was the first person executed following a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision that validated state laws to reform the capital punishment system. Since then, 997 prisoners have been executed; next week, the 998th, 999th and 1,000th are scheduled to die.
Robin Lovitt, 41, is scheduled to be the one to earn that distinction Wednesday. He was convicted of fatally stabbing a man with scissors during a 1998 pool hall robbery in Virginia.
Ahead of Lovitt on death row are Eric Nance, scheduled to be executed Monday in Arkansas, and John Hicks, scheduled to be executed Tuesday in Ohio. Both executions appear likely to proceed.
Gilmore was executed before a Utah firing squad, after a record of petty crime, the killing of a motel manager and suicide attempts in prison. His life was the basis for Norman Mailer's book The Executioner's Song and a TV miniseries.
While his case was well-known, most people today would struggle to name any of the 3,400 prisoners - including 118 foreign nationals - on death row in the United States. In the past 28 years, the United States has executed an average of one person every 10 days.
The focus of the debate on capital punishment was once the question of whether it served as a deterrent to crime. Today, the argument is more on whether the government can be trusted not to execute an innocent person.
Thomas Hill, an attorney for a death row inmate in Ohio who recently won a second stay of execution, says the answer is obvious.
"We have a criminal system that makes mistakes. If you accept that proposition, that means you have to be prepared for the inevitability that some are sentenced to death for crimes they didn't commit," Hill said.
Advocates of the death penalty say its opponents are ignoring the real victims.
"Since 1999 we've had 100,000 innocent people murdered in the U.S., but nobody is planning on commemorating all those people killed," said Michael Paranzino, president of Throw Away the Key, a group that supports the death penalty.
Race is also is an issue in the debate. Since 1976, 58 percent of those executed in the United States were white, with 34 percent black, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Non-Latino whites make up 75 percent of the U.S. population, while non-Latino blacks comprise about 12 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
"There is tremendous arbitrariness to the death penalty. . . . The race of the victims has a lot to do with who winds up getting executed," said Barry Scheck, co-founder of the New York-based Innocence Project, a legal clinic that seeks to exonerate inmates through DNA testing.
Death sentences nationwide have dropped by 50 percent since the late 1990s, with executions carried out down by 40 percent, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Twelve states do not have the death penalty, and two states - Illinois and New Jersey - have formal moratoriums on capital punishment, according to the center.
An October Gallup poll showed 64 percent of Americans support use of the death penalty. That is down from a high of 80 percent in 1994.
Since 1973, 122 prisoners have been freed from death row. The vast majority of those cases came during the past 15 years, since the use of DNA evidence became widespread. While there is no official proof an innocent person has been executed, opponents of the death penalty say the number of prisoners whose convictions have been reversed should fuel skepticism. "We've demonstrated that there are too many innocent people on death row," Scheck said.
But that argument does not impress Charles Rosenthal, district attorney for Harris County, Texas. "I don't know about every death penalty case in Texas, but I feel quite sure that no one that this office has had anything to do with was factually innocent," Rosenthal said.