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American Capital Punishment in Comparative Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

David T. Johnson
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Abstract

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.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , Fall 2011 , pp. 1033 - 1061
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2011 

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References

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