The Death Penalty

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randall McGowen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
State Power ◽  
Dramatic Decline ◽  
History Of ◽  
Passionate Commitment ◽  
Unique Ability

Although the death penalty often appears a timeless question, the last three centuries have witnessed dramatic changes in the frequency and organization of capital punishment in Europe and America. This essay examines the history of the death penalty and how it has reflected changing social and judicial ideas. The punishment became a target of intense complaint in the eighteenth century, which led to a dramatic decline in its use and its disappearance from public view. Yet while abolition excited passionate commitment, other groups remained committed to the retention of the death penalty, seeing it as vital to the security of society as well as a legitimate expression of a healthy emotion. The fortunes of abolition or retention have been shaped by political developments in particular nations at different times, and the penalty retains a unique ability to condense and channel powerful sentiments about the nature and goals of state power.

The Influence of Latino Ethnicity on the Imposition of the Death Penalty

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 421-431
Author(s):  
Sheri Lynn Johnson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Racial Disparities ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Experimental Studies ◽  
Archival Studies ◽  
Related Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Era

With respect to African Americans, the history of racial discrimination in the imposition of the death penalty is well-known, and the persistence of racial disparities in the modern era of capital punishment is well-documented. In contrast, the influence of Latino ethnicity on the imposition of the death penalty has been studied very little. A review of the limited literature reveals evidence of discrimination against Latinos. Archival studies generally find ethnicity-of-victim discrimination, and some of those studies find ethnicity-of-defendant discrimination disadvantaging Latino defendants; these findings parallel the findings of the much more robust literature investigating bias against African American defendants and victims. The controlled experimental studies generally show both ethnicity-of-defendant and ethnicity-of-victim discrimination disadvantaging Latinos. Related literature investigating stereotypes, animosity, and discrimination in other criminal justice decisions further suggests the likelihood of ethnicity discrimination in the imposition of capital punishment, as well as the need for further research.

The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of the Death Penalty in the United States

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 299-315
Author(s):  
Carol S. Steiker ◽  
Jordan M. Steiker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Justice System ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
History Of Race ◽  
Western Democracies

This review addresses four key issues in the modern (post-1976) era of capital punishment in the United States. First, why has the United States retained the death penalty when all its peer countries (all other developed Western democracies) have abolished it? Second, how should we understand the role of race in shaping the distinctive path of capital punishment in the United States, given our country's history of race-based slavery and slavery's intractable legacy of discrimination? Third, what is the significance of the sudden and profound withering of the practice of capital punishment in the past two decades? And, finally, what would abolition of the death penalty in the United States (should it ever occur) mean for the larger criminal justice system?

scholarly journals Capital Sentencing: The Effect of Adding Aggravators to Death Penalty Statutes in Pennsylvania

2004 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Schultz Newman ◽  
Eric Rayz ◽  
Scott Eric Friedman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Statistical Study ◽  
The United States ◽  
Capital Sentencing ◽  
Detailed History ◽  
Current State ◽  
History Of

The birthplace of the American republic—the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania—has historically been at the forefront of the capital punishment legislation in the United States. It was the first colony in the Union to abolish the death penalty for all crimes with the exception of murder. It was the first to set forth a statutory distinction between different degrees of criminal homicide, confining imposition of capital punishment to the most chilling form of this crime—“willful, deliberate, and premeditated killing.” With this storied history in mind, we have undertaken the task of examining the current state of the death penalty in the Commonwealth. Hence, in Part II of this Article, we set forth a detailed history of the capital sentencing scheme in Pennsylvania. Part III undertakes a statistical study of the imposition of the death penalty in the Commonwealth from 1978 until 1997. In Part IV, we conclude by summing up our general observations.

Precedent and Perversity in Wordsworth's Sonnets Upon the Punishment of Death

1996 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon M. Setzer
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
The Political ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Biblical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Uncritical Acceptance ◽  
The Aesthetic

First published in 1840, at the height of the controversy over capital punishment in England, Wordsworth's Sonnets Upon the Punishment of Death counter the movement toward political reform through their massive appeal to ancient history, poetical history, and the history of poetic form. While Wordsworth attempts to ground his authority in the biblical history reconstituted in Milton's Paradise Lost and the classical history of Lucius Junius Brutus recuperated during the French Revolution, his argument for the political imperative of the death penalty is inextricably bound up with the aesthetic imperatives of the sonnet form. The sonnet series as a whole thus betrays a perverse appropiation of literary and historical precedent as well as an uncritical acceptance of Petrarchan conventions.

Public Opinion and the French Capital Punishment Debate of 1908

2014 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 575-609 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Donovan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Justice System ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Public ◽  
Lower House ◽  
Democratic Control ◽  
History Of

Academics have traditionally associated capital punishment most closely with authoritarian regimes. They have assumed an incompatibility between the death penalty and the presumably humane values of modern liberal democracy. However, recent scholarship on the United States by David Garland has suggested that a considerable degree of direct democratic control over a justice system actually tends to favor the retention and application of the death penalty. The reason why the United States has retained capital punishment after it has been abolished in other Western nations is not because public opinion is more supportive of the death penalty in America than in Europe or in Canada. Rather, it is because popular control over the justice system is greater in the United States than in other countries and this strengthens the influence of America's retentionist majority. However, the experience of the United States in this regard has not been unique. The same link between democratic control and retention of the death penalty can be seen in the history of the effort to abolish capital punishment in France. In 1908, a bill in the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of the French Parliament) to abolish capital punishment was defeated, in large part because of strong opposition from the public. In 1981, majority public opinion in France still favored retention of the death penalty, but in that year, the nation's Parliament defied popular sentiment and outlawed the ultimate punishment. Historians have so far provided little insight into why abolition succeeded in 1981 when it failed in 1908. The explanation for the different outcome appears to have been the greater degree of influence public opinion exerted over the nation's justice system at the turn of the twentieth century than at its end.

scholarly journals Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peggy Kamuf
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
History Of ◽  
Poetic Work

This book pursues Derrida’s assertion, in The Death Penalty, Volume I, that “the modern history of the institution named literature in Europe over the last three or four centuries is contemporary with and indissociable from a contestation of the death penalty.” The main question this book poses is: How does literature contest the death penalty today, particularly in the United States where it remains the last of its kind, a Christian-inspired death penalty in what professes to be a democracy? What resources do fiction, narrative, and poetic language supply in the age of the remains of the death penalty? These are among the questions that guide the analyses of four literary works, each a depiction or an account of an execution, in the search for deconstructive leverage on the concepts that prop up capital punishment. Different pertinent features are isolated in these texts: the “mysteries” of literary or poetic witness; the publicness of punishment in an era of secrecy around the death penalty; the undecidable difference between death by capital punishment and by suicide—a difference that Kant enforces and that Derrida contests; and even the collapse of the distinction between the sovereign powers to put to death and to pardon, a possibility that is shown up by a poetic work when, performatively, it “plays the law.” In relation to the death penalties they represent, these literary survivals may be seen as the ashes or remains of the phantasm that the death penalty has always been, the phantasm of calculating and thus ending finitude.

Damnatio Memoriae

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (12) ◽  
pp. 52-63
Author(s):  
Alexander B. Joy ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
The State ◽  
Public Affair ◽  
Electrical Shocks ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government

Are we just the sum of our memories? Is erasing all the memories of a person more, or less humane, than the death penalty? In this work of philosophical short story fiction, a member of the diplomatic corps recounts the history of Etescanate people and the evolution of their implantation of the death penalty over the centuries. Initially, the death penalty was a drawn out, painful and public affair. As time progressed, it remained public, but became more humane. With the advent of new technologies, it was moved indoors as a private affair where electrical shocks or injections were used. Now, the Etescanate people believe they have found the most humane form of capital punishment, complete memory erasure. Those that are found guilty of the most serious crimes are given a chemical cocktail that completely erases their minds of their entire past. There is one caveat to this punishment, while the government has outlawed killing by the state, it still leaves open the possibility of killing by others and, in some cases, the convicted opt to be killed privately instead.

God and the Gallows: Christianity and Capital Punishment in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

2004 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 330-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh Mcleod
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Full Force ◽  
The City

At the end of the eighteenth century the ‘bloody code’ was still in full force in England and Wales. There were some two hundred offences which carried the death penalty, ranging from murder to stealing goods worth five shillings from a shop. In the 1780s several hundred men, women and children were sentenced to death each year, and though rather over half were reprieved, there were still about two hundred executions. In London, condemned prisoners were confined in Newgate prison in the City, and until 1783 they were transported two miles to be hanged at Tyburn on the western outskirts of the metropolis. There were usually large crowds lining the streets, and particularly notorious criminals might expect up to thirty thousand spectators at their death. A clergyman would travel in the cart with the prisoners, his main purpose being to ensure that they died repentant, and, it was hoped, with better prospects in the next world than in the present one.

The Sentence Is the Story

2018 ◽  
pp. 94-122
Author(s):  
Peggy Kamuf
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Recent History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The U.S

This chapter takes up Norman Mailer’s 1979 novel The Executioner’s Song as chronicle of the “modern death penalty” era post-Gregg v. Georgia. Two questions or issues frame my analysis: the relation between narrative structure in general and the death penalty plot; the distinction between execution and suicide. The first issue is explored with the help of narratologists, but especially Walter Benjamin. The second reviews Kant’s argument that “no one can will [capital] punishment” and Derrida’s remarks, contra Kant, on the undecidability of execution and suicide. The chapter concludes with a brief reading of Mailer’s 1964 poem of the same title as his novel and speculates on how these two texts read the recent history of the U.S. death penalty.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
David M. Doyle ◽  
Liam O’Callaghan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Legal Proceedings ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Crime ◽  
Revolutionary Period

This chapter opens with a micro-history of the murder of Ellen O’Sullivan by David O’Shea in rural Cork in 1931; this case study is used to introduce some of the key themes of the book, particularly around the social history of capital punishment in Ireland. The chapter then outlines the history of capital punishment in Ireland in the nineteenth century before analysing, in detail, the executions carried out during the revolutionary period and the civil war, and the attendant legal proceedings. Political crime and emergency legislation would remain key themes in the history of capital punishment after independence. The chapter then outlines the legal and technical procedures associated with the death penalty in independent Ireland. This key contextual material sets the scene for the remainder of the book.

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