Capital Punishment in the United States of America

The United States stands apart from the general trends on capital punishment. It is the only Western industrialized nation where executions still take place. Furthermore, it is the only nation that combines frequent executions with a highly developed legal system characterized by respect for individual rights (Encarta, 2007). Many public opinion polls indicate that capital punishment enjoys significant support in the United States. Nonetheless, it remains a highly controversial and hotly contested issue (Encarta, 2007).

In This paper however I will explore the developmental trends and social purposes of capital punishment in the United States as well as the contrasting views about deterrence as justification for capital punishment, simultaneously I will pertain to other nations parallel to US that still utilize death penalty as method of punishment namely China etc.

The US policy towards capital punishment has been constantly changing for many decades. In colonial America, the meting out of criminal punishment used to be a local matter which included any of a range of sanctions, among them fines, flogging, the stockade, banishment, and the gallows but not imprisonment (Dolovich, 2005). For the distrustful, observing an execution is one way to make sure that the killing takes place.

However, an earlier era of public execution ended in the United States in 1936 because was believed that exposing ordinary citizens to the spectacle of hanging, gassing, electrocution, or lethal injection would not have social benefit (Banner, 2002). Execution needed not to be witness even if it provides some comfort to the relatives of the victim and it reassures those who care for the condemned offender's welfare that no gratuitous suffering is inflicted (Zimring, p. 57). Between 1950 and 1965, executions steadily diminished from over a hundred a year to fewer than ten. By 1967, federal courts had imposed a prohibition on execution so that a series of challenges to the principles and procedures of capital punishment could be decided. The nationwide judicial moratorium on executions would last a decade.

Indeed, the United States seemed to follow the emerging policy trends towards abolishing executions throughout the developed world in the 1970s. Death penalty was condemned not only by street demonstrators but by the European governmental leadership (Zimring, 2003, p. 4). The U.S. Supreme Court favoured judicial abolition of capital punishment in 1972. However, in the quarter-century after 1975, policy in both the United States and the rest of the developed West has been changing rapidly and in opposite directions (Zimring, 2003, p. 5). All of the divergent elements of American policy that are evident in current international comparisons are based on changes in policy in the United States that have occurred since those 1976 Supreme Court decisions. While the rest of the Western world has been creating and attempting to enforce non-execution as a human rights orthodoxy, the policy of the national government in the United States has shifted to the toleration of capital punishment by the states, and a series of capital crimes have been added by the federal Congress for the limited jurisdiction of the federal government. The result of these shifts in policy is reflected in the trends in the number of executions by year since 1977.

Analogous to the situation of capital punishment in the United States is the China, which makes use of death penalty to a much higher extent (Anckar 2004, p. 9). The 1990s was also the momentum of abolition of the death penalty worldwide. Asia, Middle East nations, and other countries under strong Islamic influence almost maintained regimes with at least token levels of executions. For example, in Asia, only Hong Kong, Cambodia, and Nepal have formally abolished the death penalty, and the first one of these nations is closely linked to the British in political values and institutions. A wide variation ...

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What is more, by the year 2000 the volume of executions by American states had bounced back to levels quite close to those experienced during the early 1950s. The data in US department of justice (2006) appears to be a symmetrical policy pattern in the United States, with declines to zero in the first half of the post-war period and a return to a level of execution in the late 1990s quite close to the historical pattern of fifty years before (Zimring, 2003, p. 6). By May 2001 there had been more than 700 executions since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the death penalty back on American soil, but no other condemned criminal had presented credentials of this calibre for a feel-good execution, for a triumphant reaffirmation that government killing can be a good thing. There was unprecedented media attention not only throughout the United States but around the world (Zimring, 2003, p. 4).

The legal and political history of the death penalty in the United States has closely paralleled the debate within social sciences about its efficacy as a deterrent. Punishment, like death penalty, has been a huge and very public debate since at least the 1970s, when much of the American electorate lost faith in the idea of rehabilitation (Westbrook, 2006). Thus, America decided to reconsider death sentence in order to threaten those who are trying to commit heinous crimes. Evidence for capital punishment's general deterrent effect comes from three sources: logic, firsthand reports, and social science research. Kleck (1979, p. 907) argues that homicide seems to be deterrable by legal sanctions, even though it is not specifically deterred by the rarely imposed death penalty.

Nevertheless, the death penalty was seen as a tool for upholding order in societies marked by ethnic or religious divisions. Within the United States, racial tensions have been frequent in the past, particularly between African-Americans and whites in the south. These tensions culminated, in the 1950s and 1960s, with the fight for civil rights, but even today tensions persist, as the example of the riots in Los Angeles in 1992. Although tensions between blacks and whites have been particularly in focus, other ethnic divisions such as Hispanics should not be neglected.

In fact, the position of America on the law and practice of capital punishment is singular. Alone among the Western democracies, state governments, the United States authorize and conduct executions as criminal punishment and show no clear indication of a willingness to stop doing so. Criminal justice systems in the United States attempt to merge a system of extensive procedures and review with execution as a legal outcome. But the result has been a frustrating and lengthy process that combines all of the disadvantages of procedural regularity with unprincipled and arbitrary outcomes (Zimring, 2003, p. 5). The pursuit of eradicating crime is impossible but there are mitigating measures that governments could deploy to decrease crime rates.

Moreover, Zimring (2003, p. 123) proceeds to consider that the underlying cause of lynching and executions is the ‘vigilante values’ – a deeply held American belief in violent social justice that imbedded in the culture and experience of the United States – that explains why the USA deploys a penalty that the rest of the western world finds abhorrent likewise Garland (2005, p. 352) believes that “conflict over the death penalty will continue as long as the values that support it have a significant constituency in the United States. So the end of the death penalty at any point in our experience will probably be the beginning of the end of conflicting images of punishment in our culture. This effort to purge death penalty has already been launched. The length and the intensity of the struggle necessary to end the death penalty are not yet known, but the ultimate outcome seems inevitable in any but the most pessimistic view of the American future” (p. 203).

However, some researchers (e.g., Logan, 1975; Hussain & Sarat, 2004; Kahan, Katyal & Meares, 2004) doubt the power of deterrence in preventing people from doing crimes. Theoretical framework for deterrence argument, according to Donohue & Wolfers (2005), is simple – to raise the price of murder for criminals, and get less of it. In other words, death penalty raises the price of homicide as long as execution is worse than life imprisonment for most potential murderers. Not only did very few homicides lead to a death sentence, but the prospect of execution did not greatly affect the life expectancy of death row inmates. It implies that deterrence is not the most effective means of eradicating crimes or stopping people from brutally offending. Deterrence may not always affect the instance of committing crimes. Indeed, there are other researchers that concur with this statement. Today more than two million people are incarcerated in state and federal prisons and local jails in the US (Peacework, 2000), and the notion of deterrence has heavily influenced the massive escalation of imprisonment over the last two decades.

Hence, the modern deterrence research has failed to find consistent evidence of the deterrent effects of punishment. Sarat (2001) argues that “state killing damages us all, calling into question the extent of the difference between the killing done in our name and the killing that all of us would like to stop and, in the process, weakening, not strengthening democratic political institutions” (p. 15). Public attitude towards the death penalty varies not only over time, but also on what sort of question is being asked. The American public believes that death is an appropriate penalty for murder, but the average citizen neither trusts nor supports the system that determines who shall be executed (Zimring, 2003, p. 10). Also, death penalty means different things to different people. It could be an issue of deep moral significance, a means of achieving justice or revenge, an event in the news, or a social phenomenon.

Finally, regardless of policy debates and moral disagreement, differences in opinions are inevitable for there will always be clashes between authoritarianism and egalitarianism, righteousness and tolerance, compassion for victims of crime and compassion for victims of social deprivation (Kahan, 1999, p. 450). Social norms can promote punishment when it is effectively implemented convincing the lawbreaker not to repeat his transgression.

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