Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition

Abstract

To answer why the United States, among Western democracies, still utilizes the death penalty, the Scottish-born sociologist and lawyer David Garland sets out to “describe and explain the peculiar institution of American capital punishment in all its complex, controversial detail and to explore its relationship to the society that sustains it” (p. 7). In doing so, he seeks to employ “a measure of detachment—a suspension of judgment in the interests of clear-eyed description and objective analysis” (ibid.). The result is a comprehensive and penetrating criminological study that avoids the moralistic claims of both advocates and opponents of capital punishment to reveal the evolution of a complicated and ambivalent system—one that retains the death penalty as law in 35 of 50 states and the federal government, holding more than 3,200 offenders on death row, yet which lately executes fewer than 60 persons per year and aims to carry out each execution as painlessly as possible. Using a multidisciplinary, largely sociological approach, Garland, a professor at New York University, draws heavily from secondary historical sources to trace the development of American capital punishment from the founding of the republic to the present day.