On January 17, 1977, spree killer Gary Gilmore was taken to an abandoned cannery behind the state prison in Utah. Strapped to an old wooden office chair, he stared out at a black curtain with five slits made for the deer rifles held behind the partition by five anonymous prison guards. Gilmore had famously clamored for his own execution and when asked for his final words, simply said, “Let’s do it.” He became the first prisoner to be executed in America after the Supreme Court’s rehabilitation of the death penalty a year earlier.

Eight months after the bullets tore through Gilmore’s heart, France raised the blade of its guillotine one last time, beheading a Tunisian immigrant who had sexually tortured and strangled a young French nanny. Soon after, Western Europe became a region where governments do not kill in order to demonstrate that killing is wrong. Scores of countries elsewhere, from Mexico and the Philippines to Cambodia and Rwanda, have also forsaken punishment by death. The United States has chosen a different course. Lethal injections, electrocutions, and other means of judicial death have become an eye-catching case of American exceptionalism, but there are signs that the country is finally becoming less exceptional in this regard.

Last year, state and federal courts put 37 inmates to death, the lowest number since 1994. This year, there has been a spike in executions-30 altogether, 16 in Texas alone-attributable largely to a backlog caused by a series of stays issued by the Supreme Court as it considered the constitutionality of lethal injections, stays lifted once the Court reaffirmed this preferred method of execution in April of last year. Still, the trend is clear. Executions have dipped steadily since the high-water mark of 98 a decade ago; death sentences have dropped dramatically from 328 in 1994 to 111 this past year. Capital punishment is in slow decline.

A number of states are thinking of shuttering their death houses entirely. With the most fanfare, New Mexico repealed its death-penalty statute in March, a year and three months after New Jersey had lifted its statute (New York, the only other state to abolish the death penalty in recent times, did so by court order in 2004). Following New Mexico’s repeal, the state’s Catholic Democratic governor, Bill Richardson, met briefly with Pope Benedict in April before being feted, together with Archbishop Michael Sheehan of Santa Fe, at a ceremony in the Roman Colosseum, where the nighttime illumination turns from white to gold each time a death sentence is commuted or a jurisdiction outlaws the practice. (The events were orchestrated by the Sant’Egidio Community, a lay Catholic association of special note in the international campaign to stamp out capital punishment.)