NCJ Number
212386
Journal
Punishment & Society Volume: 7 Issue: 4 Dated: October 2005 Pages: 347-376
Date Published
October 2005
Length
30 pages
Annotation
This article critiques recent publications that suggest America's retention of the death penalty, while it is prohibited in most other countries, is an expression of a distinctive American cultural tradition.
Abstract
Both Zimring and Whitman attribute America's retention of capital punishment to a persistent cultural tradition related to violent responses against those who violate laws and tradition. This article rejects this reasoning because it implies that social attitudes such as "punitiveness" or "racism" are unchanging cultural legacies passed like DNA from generation to generation. The author argues that the contexts that forge social attitudes are always changing under variations in economic competition, political conflict, and specific events. Further, the probability that public attitudes or "cultures" will influence the state's penal policy is conditioned not just by their intensity and pervasiveness but also by the extent to which the political process permits their expression and facilitates their transference into legal action. The fact that 38 States and the Federal Government still use capital punishment is not due to an unchanging and distinctive American culture, according to the author, but rather to political factors and the characteristics of America's government structure. The real test of a society's commitment to capital punishment is not only the existence of capital punishment as a sanction, but also the percentage of capital sentences dispensed in a jurisdiction and the percentage of death row inmates actually executed. These outcomes depend on local procedural conventions, a prosecutorial ethic that values the aggressive pursuit of prompt executions, the qualifications of defense attorneys willing to represent death-sentenced inmates in postconviction proceedings, and the percentage of judges in a jurisdiction disposed to uphold death sentences. 60 notes and 78 references