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Social Forces 82.3 (2004) 1229-1232



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The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment. By Franklin Zimring. Oxford University Press, 2003. 258 pp. Cloth, $30.00.

Considering its modest length, Franklin Zimring's Contradictions of American Capital Punishment is a complex book. First and foremost, it attempts to explain why the U.S. finds itself increasingly isolated among Western democracies in continuing to embrace the death penalty. But in doing so, the book also explores the cultural roots of the sanction in this country, the large regional differences in execution patterns within the U.S., the intensification of the American [End Page 1229] capital punishment debate during the 1990s — by which time the matter had been largely settled elsewhere in the world — and the future of state-imposed death as a political issue. Zimring may have taken on too much here, raising more important questions than he can answer conclusively. But the questions are so significant and his answers so intriguing that the book merits the attention of death penalty scholars in a number of disciplines.

Space limits prevent me from even summarizing all the arguments in Zimring's book, much less discussing them in the detail they deserve. In essence, he suggests that the death penalty in the U.S. must be understood in terms of the interplay between two contradictory cultural traditions. One of these emphasizes due process and the mistrust of centralized government, while the other is based upon vigilante values and direct social control by local communities. In Europe, where vigilante values are weak, the death penalty has been reframed in recent years as a human rights question, and the consensus among European elites is that no nation that continues to execute its citizens can be considered fully civilized. Even though European opinion surveys reveal popular approval of the death penalty comparable to that in the U.S., no serious reinstatement effort has emerged in any Western democracy or is likely to. In the U.S., in contrast, the death penalty continues to be discussed almost entirely as a domestic crime policy matter. The notion that an execution could be compared to torture, political imprisonment, or slavery strikes most Americans as bizarre. Moreover, executions are increasingly justified here as a "service" to victims' families to help them achieve emotional "closure." Execution is rarely criticized as an illegitimate application of state power, thus depriving abolitionists of a potentially fruitful angle of attack.

The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment also brings the due process-vigilantism dichotomy to bear on the marked state and regional variations in the death penalty's application. While both these cultural strands are identifiable throughout the U.S., Zimring shows that states with weaker traditions of vigilante violence are less likely to have reinstated capital punishment after the 1976 Supreme Court ruling in Gregg v. Georgia. If they did reinstate, they are less likely to have actually executed significant portions of those inmates sentenced to die. States with long histories of vigilante justice — most notably in the South — are the states with the highest execution rates. This hypothesis is plausible, of course, and the author supports it with historical data on lynching. The more difficult task is finding direct evidence of the continuing impact of vigilante values in more recent times when the extraordinary divergence in executions between and within states has emerged. To make his case, Zimring relies on scattered survey data, concealed firearms laws, and rates of self-defense killings as proxies, and he acknowledges that such evidence is merely indirect and suggestive. Hopefully survey researchers will follow his lead in crafting new instruments that will allow for more adequate tests of his hypotheses. [End Page 1230]

The final chapters of The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment, in which Zimring turns to the death penalty "end game" in America, are perhaps the only weak parts in an otherwise excellent book. Recent judicial struggles with the appeals process and heightened concerns about miscarriages of justice, he writes, suggest that the abolition process has already begun. The ongoing value conflict, however, ensures that capital punishment will not...

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