Imbued with their own form of patriotism, many Americans fervently link words like freedom, liberty, and democracy with that hallowed term the United States; however, to capture well the character of some major parts of the nation, they need to include the word punitiveness.
The map above shows the United States in bed with China, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea, and several other nations not banning capital punishment. Japan is the only industrial democracy besides the United States that retains a death penalty. The General Assembly of the United Nations, as recently as 2014, has called for a global moratorium on capital punishment. The US consistently opposes the initiative, and continues to , some of them innocent, in very nasty ways.
As can be seen in the second map, is by no means distributed equally throughout the United States. Indeed, since 1976, when the US Supreme Court reinstituted the death penalty, most of the 1411 individuals put to death (including 15 women and 22 juveniles) were executed in only 2% of all the counties in the US. Texas performed the most executions, but , has been the killingest.
What is going on in those ? Is their disproportionate number of executions the result of incompetence and prosecutorial misconduct?
Or is it something deeper? Is the disproportionate killing of people of color another in the US?
Is the capital punishment rate, like the murder rate, a symptom of a “culture of honor”? Are both rates, which are disproportionately , largely bi-products of “cultures of honor” and an associated desire for retribution, the old idea of an eye for an eye and “just deserts” for unwanted behavior—an eagerness to punish that is impervious to the fact that sometimes are convicted of crimes?
Stay tuned for a post on the door that Supreme Court Justice Stephan Breyer may have opened to reconsideration of the national shame called capital punishment.
Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology