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?

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.

American Capital Punishment in Comparative Perspective

2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (04) ◽  
pp. 1033-1061 ◽  
Author(s):  
David T. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
American History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Local Version ◽  
Western Nations ◽  
Western Democracies

It is often said that American capital punishment fulfills no purposes, serves no functions, and possesses no coherent rationale. In Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (2010), David Garland argues that American capital punishment is functional, meaningful, and effective, especially in the cultural realm of death penalty discourse. He also demonstrates that America's radically local version of democracy helps explain why the death penalty has persisted in the United States long after it disappeared in other Western democracies and that many of the peculiar forms through which American capital punishment is now administered have been designed to deny association with the lynchings that have occurred in American history. Garland arrives at these conclusions by comparing capital punishment in contemporary America with death penalty systems from the American past and from other Western nations. This essay argues that comparison with Asia further illuminates what is peculiar—and ordinary—in American capital punishment.

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.

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.

scholarly journals Litigating in the Shadow of Innocence

2006 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence C. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Justice System ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Supreme Court

In 1976, the Supreme Court of the United States, allowing optimism to trump experience, accepted various states’ assurances that new death penalty procedures the states had then recently adopted would avoid the vices that had led the Court to strike down the death penalty in 1972. Now, some thirty years later, a body of evidence has developed demonstrating that this experiment has failed—that the problems of arbitrariness, racism and propensity to error are endemic to the criminal justice system (particularly with regard to capital punishment) and cannot be cured by what Justice Blackmun called “tinker[ing] with the machinery of death.” Despite the Court’s best intentions, the death penalty procedures of the 1980s and 1990s and the first half of this decade reflect little if any significant improvement over the condemned pre-1972 systems.

scholarly journals ZAGADNIENIE KARY ŚMIERCI W STANACh ZJEDNOCZONYCH AMERYKI

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Wojciech Kwiatkowski
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Legal Representation ◽  
Capital Trials ◽  
The Usa ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of

THE ISSUE OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN THE UNITED STATES Summary This article describes the issue of capital punishment in the United States, including the history of the death penalty as administered in the USA and the main court rulings on this matter (e.g. the definition of categories of exemption or restrictions on the methods or conditions of execution). The article also describes numerous efforts (mostly on the grounds of court rulings) to improve the quality of legal representation and enhance the fairness of capital trials and appeals for defendants facing the death penalty. The article concludes with statistics which show that states with capital punishment on the statute book do not generally have lower murder or crime rates and that since 1973 138 persons sentenced to death have been acquitted in outcome of the discovery and proof of miscarriage of justice.

scholarly journals Can Capital Punishment Survive If Black Lives Matter?

2021 ◽  
pp. 199-217
Author(s):  
Michael Cholbi ◽  
Alex Madva
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Racial Bias ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Implicit Biases ◽  
Murder Victims ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Race

Drawing upon empirical studies of racial discrimination, the Movement for Black Lives platform calls for the abolition of capital punishment. The authors defend the Movement’s claim that the death penalty in the United States is a “racist practice” that “devalues Black lives.” They first sketch the jurisprudential history of race and capital punishment in the United States, wherein courts have occasionally expressed worries about racial injustice but have usually called for reform rather than abolition. They argue that the racial discrimination at issue flows in part from implicit biases concerning race, criminality, and violence, which do not fit comfortably within the picture of racial bias advanced by the courts. The case for abolition rests on Black Americans as a class (not merely those who interact with the criminal justice system as capital defendants or as murder victims) being subject to such bias and thereby not being accorded equal status under the law.

The Setting

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolette D. Manglos-Weber
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Trust ◽  
The United States ◽  
Evangelical Christianity ◽  
Interracial Relations ◽  
Personal Trust ◽  
Conceptual Background ◽  
History Of ◽  
Role Of Religion

This chapter presents the historical and conceptual background to the book’s argument. It starts with a history of Ghana, followed by an analysis of the trends that have led to high levels of out-migration, and then to a description of Ghanaian populations in Chicago. Next, it addresses the concept of social trust in general and personal trust in particular, developing a theory of personal trust as an imaginative and symbolic activity, and analyzing interracial relations through the lens of racialized distrust. It concludes by describing the role of religion in the integration of immigrant groups into the United States and the particular religious frameworks that characterize Charismatic Evangelical Christianity in Ghana.

Patient Autonomy, Capacity, and Consent

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Donnelly ◽  
Jessica Berg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
National Standard ◽  
Legal Principles ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Human Rights Norms ◽  
Law And Legislation

This chapter explores a number of key issues: the role of competence and capacity, advance directives, and decisions made for others. It analyses the ways these are treated in the United States and in selected European jurisdictions. National-level capacity legislation and human rights norms play a central role in Europe, which means that healthcare decisions in situations of impaired capacity operate in accordance with a national standard. In the United States, the legal framework is more state-based (rather than federal), and the courts have played a significant role, with both common law and legislation varying considerably across jurisdictions. Despite these differences, this chapter identifies some similar legal principles which have developed.

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