Capital Punishment and the American Agenda

This book redefines the central political and legal issues of the death penalty in the light of the social, political, and moral conditions of the United States.

Franklin E. Zimring (Author), Gordon Hawkins (Author)

9780521378635, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 24 February 1989

212 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.2 cm, 0.32 kg

The death penalty is not simply the most serious criminal punishment. It has been a singular social, legal, and moral problem in the Western world over the past two hundred years. Capital punishment is disappearing from every nation in the West except the United States. No political science of capital punishment in the United States has been attempted until this book. Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins offer a redefinition of the central political and legal issues and a re-examination of the whole subject in the light of the social, political, and moral conditions of the United States in the 1980s. Lawyers, criminologists, political scientists, and motivated general readers will find the profile of a United States pursuing an active execution policy in the 1980s and 1990s to be an original and compelling contribution to the discussion of the future of the death penalty. Zimring and Hawkins's prediction for future policy, while based on historical precedent, is in sharp contrast to conventional wisdom about the United States Supreme Court. This book was first published in 1986.

Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part I. The Road to 1987: 1. The rest of the Western world
2. The long-term trend that failed
3. The death penalty and the Eighth Amendment
4. A punishment in search of a crime
Part II. Futures and Consequences: 5. A game of chicken
6. Only in America: some notes on lethal injection
7. Life in a country that kills
8. The path to abolition
Appendix: deterrence and the death penalty
Index.

Subject Areas: Central government policies [JPQB], Crime & criminology [JKV]