Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Notes on the contributors
- 1 Capital punishment: improve it or remove it?
- 2 International law and the death penalty: reflecting or promoting change?
- 3 Doctors and the death penalty: ethics and a cruel punishment
- 4 Replacing the death penalty: the vexed issue of alternative sanctions
- 5 Religion and the death penalty in the United States: past and present
- 6 On botched executions
- 7 Death as a penalty in the Shari'ā
- 8 Abolishing the death penalty in the United States: an analysis of institutional obstacles and future prospects
- 9 Capital punishment in the United States: moratorium efforts and other key developments
- 10 The experience of Lithuania's journey to abolition
- 11 The death penalty in South Korea and Japan: ‘Asian values’ and the debate about capital punishment?
- 12 Georgia, former republic of the USSR: managing abolition
- 13 Capital punishment in the Commonwealth Caribbean: colonial inheritance, colonial remedy?
- 14 Public opinion and the death penalty
- 15 Capital punishment: meeting the needs of the families of the homicide victim and the condemned
- Index
8 - Abolishing the death penalty in the United States: an analysis of institutional obstacles and future prospects
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Notes on the contributors
- 1 Capital punishment: improve it or remove it?
- 2 International law and the death penalty: reflecting or promoting change?
- 3 Doctors and the death penalty: ethics and a cruel punishment
- 4 Replacing the death penalty: the vexed issue of alternative sanctions
- 5 Religion and the death penalty in the United States: past and present
- 6 On botched executions
- 7 Death as a penalty in the Shari'ā
- 8 Abolishing the death penalty in the United States: an analysis of institutional obstacles and future prospects
- 9 Capital punishment in the United States: moratorium efforts and other key developments
- 10 The experience of Lithuania's journey to abolition
- 11 The death penalty in South Korea and Japan: ‘Asian values’ and the debate about capital punishment?
- 12 Georgia, former republic of the USSR: managing abolition
- 13 Capital punishment in the Commonwealth Caribbean: colonial inheritance, colonial remedy?
- 14 Public opinion and the death penalty
- 15 Capital punishment: meeting the needs of the families of the homicide victim and the condemned
- Index
Summary
At any given time in the history of a society, its preferred policy on a given controversial issue can be understood to be a function of the attitudes of a wide variety of different (but overlapping) constituencies – governmental and non-governmental organisations as well as interest groups and professional associations, both local and national. The power to make and alter policy is not equally distributed among these constituencies. Anyone who hopes to change current policy needs to be able to identify exactly where each of these distinguishable constituencies stands, in the hope of finding a lever to influence that constituency in favour of the reformer's preferred policy. I propose to exploit this general idea in examining the recent history, current status and possible future developments of death penalty policy in the United States, as seen from the perspective of those who (like me) want to see the death penalty entirely abolished.
Let us begin by identifying the several constituencies whose views and behaviour are relevant to the present task; I make no claim that the following list is exhaustive, but the order in which I discuss them is designed to take us from those most intimately involved in administering the death penalty to those whose involvement is more remote. My survey concludes with a brief examination of the most current abolition strategy: a national moratorium on executions.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Capital PunishmentStrategies for Abolition, pp. 186 - 207Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
- 3
- Cited by