DNA tests won't stop capital punishment. 

Is the death penalty doomed? Consider some recent news: 

Texas Gov. George W. Bush, after letting 131 executions go forward, just agreed to a reprieve for death-row prisoner Ricky Nolen McGinn after learning that DNA tests may exonerate him. In Illinois, Republican Gov. George Ryan declared a moratorium on executions after new evidence exculpated 13 inmates. Twelve state legislatures have introduced bills to abolish capital punishment this year, with New Hampshire's nearly becoming law. Public support for the penalty stands at a 19-year low, prompting predictions that it's only a matter of time before the DNA-based exoneration of more condemned men—such as those discussed in the best seller Actual Innocence—seals capital punishment's fate.

It's a false hope, if history is any guide. Three times in our past, anti-death-penalty movements have been on the verge of success. Each time, the death penalty has returned, sometimes with even greater support than before.

The death penalty has been an American institution since the Jamestown colony executed Capt. George Kendall in 1608. For the next two centuries, death was a routine punishment up and down the colonies. Following English law, which by the 17^th century liberally doled out the death penalty, Americans resorted to the gallows not only for murder and rape but also, depending on the colony, for theft, idolatry, sodomy, slave-stealing, witchcraft, and blasphemy.

Strong opposition first emerged only after the Revolution. America's republican ideals, still burning bright, were channeled into various reformist crusades. One was the campaign, led by Philadelphia's Benjamin Rush, to replace death sentences with penitentiaries, which, it was hoped, would rehabilitate, rather than simply punish, criminals.

The Second Great Awakening—the religious revival of the early 19^th century—bolstered the abolitionist cause (as well as that of various other humanitarian crusades, from the abolition of slavery to temperance to the care of prostitutes and orphans). By the 1830s, constituents were flooding state legislatures with petitions demanding an end to capital punishment. Some states and territories passed total or near-total bans. Others stopped the widespread practice of public executions or trimmed the list of capital crimes. In 1845, reformers founded the American Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, believing America was marching down the road of progress toward enlightenment.

In the 1840s and '50s, however, the showdown over slavery shoved the movement to the margins of politics. With the onset of the Civil War, death-penalty foes despaired. "It is useless to talk of saving life," one young activist wrote to Wendell Phillips, "when we are killing by thousands." The assassinations of Presidents Lincoln and Garfield, and a general sense of social collapse in the Gilded Age, secured the movement's demise. Iowa and Maine, which had recently abolished the penalty, went so far as to re-establish it. By the 1870s, executions were taking place at a rate of 1,000 per decade.

This pattern—reform followed quickly by repeal—recurred during the next great period of public activism, the 1900s and the 'teens. Abolition once again emerged as part of a larger agenda, fueled by a quasi-scientific faith in the state's capacity to improve human character and by a socially minded Christianity. From 1907 to 1917, nine states abolished the death penalty and others implemented partial reforms. Again, however, the changes were fleeting, dashing the utopians' hopes. Race riots and labor violence in 1919 gave way to a perceived crime wave during the Prohibitionist 1920s, bringing calls for a crackdown. Once more, some of the states that had abolished capital punishment brought it back.

A third flurry of anti-death-penalty agitation came in the 1960s. By then, executions had been declining in number for three decades, and public support for the death penalty was at an all-time low. From the late '50s to the late '60s, nine more states did away with capital punishment in part or in full.

Beyond the legislative efforts, death-penalty foes adopted a new strategy of fighting in federal court. The American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and other legal outfits appealed as many capital convictions as possible, offering a barrage of arguments about why such punishment, both in individual cases and in general, was illegitimate. By 1967 they had succeeded in halting all executions—a cessation that lasted 10 years. Emboldened, state governors and attorneys general commuted the sentences of death-row prisoners.