The United States and the Death Penalty: A Dossier

Journal Articles

Disclaimer: The materials in this section are from sources outside the U.S. Government and should not be construed as an endorsement of the views or privacy policies contained therein or as official U.S. policy.

Sangillo, Gregg. DEATH AND INNOCENCE. National Journal, April. pp. 36-40. Full text available via ProQuest

At first glance, the decline of the death penalty in the United States is somewhat surprising. In the 1990s, death sentences and executions reached peak levels in the wake of the Supreme Court's 1976 reinstatement of capital punishment, after a four-year gap. Most Republican candidates and officeholders are strong supporters of the death penalty, and even Democratic candidates have generally embraced capital punishment ever since Michael Dukakis lost his presidential bid in 1988 partly because his opposition to the death penalty opened him to the "soft on crime" label. "In the early days, it was assumed that we just didn't make mistakes with any regularity in serious felony convictions, and the emergence of all these DNA exonerations has, I think, slowed down enthusiasm for the death penalty," says Daniel Givelber, a law professor at Northeastern University in Boston.
 

Lithwick, Dahlia. THE DYING DEATH PENALTY? The Washington Post, February  2007 pp. B.2 Full text available via ProQuest

In a curious application of Newtonian physics, public and state support for capital punishment is steadily declining in America just as the resolve to maintain the death penalty seems to be hardening in the one arena where death-penalty policy once had seemed poised to change: the Supreme Court.

Gawande, Atul. WHEN LAW AND ETHICS COLLIDE - WHY PHYSICIANS PARTICIPATE IN EXECUTIONS. The New England Journal of Medicine, March 2006. pp. 1221-1228. Full text available via ProQuest

This article discusses the ethical question of physicians assisting in capital punishment. Dr. Gawande is a general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Walker, R Neal. HOW THE MALFUNCTIONING DEATH PENALTY CHALLENGES THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM. Judicature. March/April 2006. pp. 265-269. Full text available via ProQuest

A hard look at the US experience with capital punishment yields the sobering conclusion that the system is deeply flawed and begs for reform. Here, Walker asks how the criminal justice system is working and what sort of effect the continued use of the death penalty has on the criminal justice system.

Chemerinsky, Erwin. THE REHNQUIST COURT AND THE DEATH PENALTY.  Georgetown Law Journal,.June 2006. pp. 1367-1387. Full text available via ProQuest

To be sure, no Justices currently on the Court take the position espoused by Justices Brennan, Marshall, and Blackmun that the death penalty is inherently unconstitutional. But over the last few years, an increasing number of Justices have expressed grave concerns about the administration of the death penalty in the United States. The Rehnquist Court's decisions overturning death sentences and imposing new procedural requirements in capital cases occurred at the same time as other decisions mandating new protections for criminal defendants, such as in Crawford and Blakely. Erwin Chemerinsky is a Alston & Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University.

Koh, Harold Hongju and Thomas R. Pickering. AMERICAN DIPLOMACY AND THE DEATH PENALTY. Foreign Service Journal, October 2003, pp. 19-25. Full text available from publisher website

"As patriotic Americans, most U.S. diplomats assume that the United States is the world’s leader in human rights. But increasingly, one issue divides us from our allies and puts us in bad company: the death penalty. Simply put, no other democratic country with our commitment to universal human rights resorts to the death penalty as frequently as we do. The statistics alone are startling. According to an Amnesty International Report issued in April 2003, 80 percent of all known executions worldwide in 2002 were carried out by just three countries: China, Iran and the United States. [...] Yet even while American courts have allowed state executions to proliferate, the rest of the world has moved in the opposite direction. At last count, 111 countries have abolished the death penalty in law or in practice. European regional organizations have made abolition of the death penalty a prerequisite to joining the 'new Europe,' and a cornerstone of European human rights policy." Harold Hongju Koh is Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale, Thomas R. Pickering, a career ambassador.