For most of its history the United States has been within the mainstream of Western enlightened thought and practice with respect to the death penalty. Sometimes ahead of the curve: Michigan abolished capital punishment in 1846, well before most of Europe; Rhode Island and Wisconsin got rid of it in 1853; North Dakota has never had it; sometimes a bit behind: seven out of nine states that had abandoned it embraced it again in the decades after the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution; sometimes - as in its tacit acceptance of lynching and of the quasi-judicial hangings which gave mob murder a veneer of legitimacy - horribly out of step. But basically part of the pack and notably so in the shadow of the Holocaust.

LRB 5 October 2000 | PDF Download