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Why the Death Penalty Still Exists in the US

By Steve Hall

That's the title of a book review of Peculiar Institution: America?s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition by David Garland, in today's Boston Globe.  The review is subtitled, "Author ties the practice to slavery, racism," and is written by Globe correspondent Kenneth J. Cooper. Why does the United States, alone among Western democracies, still have the death penalty? It?s not a new question, but David Garland, a distinguished professor of law and sociology at New York University, provides fresh answers from a multilayered analysis. In a review of several centuries of the death penalty, Garland shows it has passed through the same phases in the United States and Europe. Executions have evolved from gruesome, public displays of governmental power and impassioned expressions of revenge to more humane methods implemented in an orderly fashion behind prison walls...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on October 22, 2010 (boomark / email).