Finding something new to say about America's love affair with the death penalty is not eas
y. The subject not only amuses intense emotions, it has produced an ocean of comment from lawyers, judges, politicians, campaigners, statisticians, social scientists and quite a few demagogues. Nevertheless, Franklin Zimring, one of America's leading criminologists, has managed to rise above this cacophony to write a thought-provoking and genuinely original book, 'The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment', which deserves to become a classic.
Mr. Zimring tackles head-on the most puzzling question of all: why are Americans so determined to keep the death penalty when nearly all other developed democracies have given it up, and now view it as barbaric？ In the past two decades, attitudes in America and Europe have diverged so much that any dialogue on the subject has been replaced by blank incomprehension, and America's retention of capital punishment has become a significant diplomatic irritant. For European governments the abolition of capital punishment is a human-rights priority, and they have expended valuable political capital in trying to achieve it. American governments, Republican and Democratic, insist that the death penalty has nothing to do with human-rights, and deeply resent European efforts to make its abolition an international norm.
The difference between European and American attitudes, says Mr. Zimring, is not the breadth of support for the death penalty, but its depth. At the time of the death penalty's abolition in each developed country, a majority similar to America's, currently 65%, wanted to keep it, according to opinion polls. But when European political elites turned against it after the second world war, electorates acquiesced. Today most Europeans probably would not want it back.
The death penalty is a far more contentious issue in America, says Mr. Zimring, because the debate about it draws on a cherished American political tradition which does not exist anywhere else: vigilante justice. Many death-penalty supporters see executions not as acts of a distant or unreliable government, or even as a crime-control measure, but as an instrument of local, community justice, a form. of vengeance on behalf of the victims' relatives.
In a startling analysis, Mr. Zimring shows that most executions are performed in a few states in the south and south-west where, the lynching of African-Americans, other forms of mob violence and six-shooter justice were most endemic at the end of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. Opinion-poll support for the death penalty may be fairly uniform. across America, and 38 states have the death penalty on their books, but many states hardly ever execute anyone. The vast bulk of executions take place only where the values of the lynch mob have endured, he says.
Many people will find this linkage distasteful. But Mr. Zimring marshals a powerful ease for it, and sceptics will have to reply to his evidence, not just brash the argument aside. Americans, distrust of overweening government power is as deeply rooted a tradition as vigilante justice, Mr. Zimring concedes. However, when it comes to the death penalty, this distrust is manifest not in an abolitionist movement, as in other countries, but in the maze of legal-appeals procedures which mean that most murderers condemned to death spend years, even decades, on death mw. More death-row inmates are likely to die of old age than by execution. Neither supporters nor opponents of the death penalty are happy with this odd result.
What Americans really want is an error-free death penalty, but this can never be guaranteed, as the recent spate of death-row exonerations has shown. Moreover, Mr. Zimring argues that Americans' am bivalence about capital punishment can never be resolved. Sooner or later, one of these competing traditions——a regard for careful legal processes to seco
A．To discuss capital punishment in America
B．To support Mr. Zimring's views on capital punishment
C．To review Mr. Zimring's book on capital punishment
D．To help sell Mr. Zimring's book on capital punishment
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