The Death Penalty: An American History By Stuart Banner. Harvard University Press, 385 pages, $29.95
Warning: This book is not for the squeamish. With graphicaccounts of snapped necks and roasted flesh and rabidlike reactions to lethalinjections, Stuart Banner spares no detail in describing American methods ofexecution.
Yet Banner's timely book on the history of capital punishment inAmerica manages to be free from sensationalism. It is comprehensively researched,with a calm and modulated narrative style. He covers everything from Americanattitudes toward the death penalty through the years, to the legislative andjudicial debates over capital punishment, to the life (and death) of a condemnedcriminal, to the techniques of execution and the occasional glitches that bringto mind the phrase "cruel and unusual."
Despite the emotion swirling around this issue, Banner, a law professor atWashington University in St. Louis, Missouri, takes such a balanced andfact-oriented approach that it is difficult to tell whether he is for or againstthe death penalty. It is almost as if he is giving readers an opportunity to makeup their own minds -- even as polls show that most Americans already have. Butmake up your mind, he seems to be saying, without averting your eyes.
"Many aspects of capital punishment today appear paradoxical without anappreciation of its history," he writes. "Americans pride themselves on theircommitment to human rights, but the United States is virtually alone amongWestern nations in putting its criminals to death. ... The death penalty isintended in part to deter others from committing crimes, but we inflict it inprivate. It is often justified in retributive terms, and yet we take great careto make it as painless as possible. We can resolve these apparent paradoxes onlyby looking back at how they came to exist."
In Banner's account, the history of capital punishment mirrors the history ofthe nation. When America was a British colony, its laws on crime and punishmentmatched the mother country's. When penal reform swept Europe, it came across theAtlantic. When the young nation became prosperous enough to build and expand, oneof the first things governments built were prisons, reducing the number ofexecutions and crimes that were punishable by death. When the Civil War and itsaftermath racked the country, opinion and policy on the death penalty differeddramatically between North and South, and the laws in the South were applieddifferently for blacks and whites. And throughout American history, states thatare considered more liberal have generally had less punitive death-penalty lawsthan those that are considered more conservative.
Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in America, public executionswere commonplace for a variety of crimes -- including horse thievery, forgery,and adultery. Hangings were public events attended by thousands of people of allages, races, and social strata, and they often had an air of celebration aboutthem, even as they meant to teach stern, religious lessons. The book opens withthe story of Stephen Clark, a 16-year-old who was hanged in Salem, Massachusetts,in 1821 for the crime of arson. Clark was convicted in February of that year, andhis execution took place just a few months later. Petitions to the governorseeking clemency for Clark were quickly denied.
On execution day, Clark was taken from the jail to the gallows by carriage asspectators followed the procession. He was accompanied by his jailer, a militaryguard, armed sheriff's deputies, and a few ministers who had been helping himseek salvation. Clark declined an opportunity to address the crowd, but aminister delivered a message on his behalf: "May the youth who are present takewarning by my sad fate, not to forsake the wholesome discipline of a parent'shome."
With thousands of people watching, Clark then quietly and calmly slipped hishead into a noose. Within minutes, he was dead. It was a sobering time for thecitizens of Salem, who groaned and sighed audibly during the final moments ofClark's life.
Clark's hanging was often recalled in the following decades as some inMassachusetts pushed to abolish the death penalty. "Had Clark been imprisoned forhis fire no one would have remembered him a year later," Banner notes, "butbecause of his death sentence Clark dangled in public memory far longer than hehad lived on earth."
By the late eighteenth century, a new spirit of reform -- coupledwith the country's first wave of prison construction -- had markedly reduced thefrequency and visibility of executions. By the mid-1800s, most hangings tookplace in a jail yard, with few witnesses. And by the turn of the twentiethcentury, executions had become even more clinical and private -- first with theintroduction of the electric chair, then with the gas chamber, and finallythrough lethal injections. Banner does a masterful job of describing how thegruesome technology of death evolved through the years, and how earlyexperimental devices meant to bring on death more humanely sometimes went awry.
By the late twentieth century, of course, capital punishment had beentransformed. Although the basic concept is the same as it ever was -- to punishoffenders in the severest possible way, and to serve as a deterrent for otherwould-be criminals -- the way a death sentence is carried out from beginning toend is altogether different today. For starters, most death sentences are nowappealed repeatedly, and most people are on death row for a decade or more.What's more, a jumble of political, racial, and socioeconomic factors now playinto every death-penalty case. Nothing, Banner tells us, is uniform orpredictable -- or fair.
"The execution itself has been hidden from public view," Banner writes, "butthe issue of capital punishment has grown extraordinarily visible." He notesgrowing concern about the possibility of innocent people being executed butacknowledges that capital punishment has remained popular. Indeed, even as onepoll showed that 91 percent of respondents believed that innocent people in theUnited States are sentenced to death, support for the death penalty usuallyregisters in the 60 percent or 70 percent range. Still, a highly publicized caseof a sympathetic prisoner wrongly executed could eventually tip public opinion inthe other direction, Banner speculates.
In his final pages, Banner also entertains two other possibilities of how thedeath penalty might be curbed: The U.S. Supreme Court could revisit the issue orstate legislatures could abolish capital punishment (only 12 states currently donot have the death penalty). Both paths seem unlikely, he says. Certainly theroad through the state legislatures would require a significant shift in publicopinion.
Banner's book does not mince words about the current state of things. "Mercyhad been banished from the system, replaced by an arcane set of rules thathaphazardly selected who would live and who would die," he writes. How we got tothis point is what makes this book so fascinating and worthwhile.
