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.
Garland finds the death penalty’s evolution has been shaped by the emergence of thought that values individuals, including the convicted; a bourgeois refinement that recoils at bloody scenes; and a penal system that has made executions as a matter of punishment, not sovereign will.
What then accounts for the persistence of the death penalty laws on the books of 35 states and the federal government?
The title hints at the most provocative part of Garland’s answer. In American history, the “peculiar institution’’ is slavery. Anyone who thinks its vestiges were wiped out by the Emancipation Proclamation or civil rights laws should read this book and think again.
Until the 1970s, the United States and Europe were headed toward abolishing the death penalty, which other Western nations had accomplished by the 1980s. In Europe, abolition occurred through acts of one-party parliamentary systems or decrees from constitutional courts, even if public opinion favored the death penalty.
In 1972, the Supreme Court came close to doing likewise when it ruled existing death penalty statutes unconstitutional. That decision was the outcome of a campaign by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which built on arguments that executions in Southern states amounted to “legal lynchings’’ of black men who, for instance, were the only defendants receiving death sentences for rape (of white women).
The moment of abolition was near, but slipped away. Majority public opinion shifted from opposing capital punishment to supporting it. Garland attributes the change to a reaction that cast the death penalty as “a litmus test in the politics of crime control, a powerful symbol of states’ rights, and a prominent part of a conservative backlash against civil rights.’’ Racism, he notes, was encoded in all three.
The Harvard Press Typepad site featured the post, "America's Death Penalty as Strange Social Fact," last month.
In Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition, David Garland explains how capital punishment has persisted in the United States after being outlawed in all other Western nations. The endurance, he says, stems from the manner in which the American death penalty has come to bear the distinctive hallmarks of America’s political institutions and cultural conflicts. Below, Professor Garland outlines his anthropological approach to the topic and explains the implications of his book’s title. David Garland is Arthur T. Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology at New York University. Peculiar Institution is new this month.
When I talk to people about my book on capital punishment, the first thing they invariably ask is, “Is your book for it or against it?” The answer, I tell them, is neither.
In its discussion of America’s death penalty, Peculiar Institution diverges from the familiar cultural script that shapes most of our conversation. Instead of treating capital punishment as a moral dilemma to be debated, a policy problem to be resolved, or a constitutional question to be settled, the book approaches the institution as a strange social fact that stands in need of explanation.
The second thing my interlocutors invariably ask is: “Why is the book entitled Peculiar Institution?” After all, isn’t the death penalty a familiar American institution that everyone knows? What is “peculiar” about that? And occasionally someone will ask if “peculiar institution” isn’t the name that southerners used to give to the institution of racialized slavery and which Kenneth Stampp memorably described in his classic book of that name?
Here is what I reply:
The death penalty is certainly familiar in the US, particularly in the southern states where most executions now take place. But in the UK where I grew up, and in the rest of the western world, capital punishment has long since been abolished and is widely regarded as a violation of human rights. Europe became a death penalty-free zone in 1981 when France finally dismantled its guillotine and in the years since, membership of the European Union has come to be conditioned upon abolishing the death penalty.
And, in any case, not every US region embraces the death penalty and thinks of it as a traditional practice.