“Why the death penalty still exists in the US: Author ties the practice to slavery, racism”

The title of this post is the headline of this book review appearing in today’s Boston Globe. The review is of this new book by Professor David Garland, titled “Peculiar Institution America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition.”  Here is how the review gets started:

Why does the United States, alone among Western democracies, still have the death penalty? It’s not a new question, but David Garland, a distinguished professor of law and sociology at New York University, provides fresh answers from a multilayered analysis.

In a review of several centuries of the death penalty, Garland shows it has passed through the same phases in the United States and Europe. Executions have evolved from gruesome, public displays of governmental power and impassioned expressions of revenge to more humane methods implemented in an orderly fashion behind prison walls.

Garland finds the death penalty’s evolution has been shaped by the emergence of thought that values individuals, including the convicted; a bourgeois refinement that recoils at bloody scenes; and a penal system that has made executions as a matter of punishment, not sovereign will.

What then accounts for the persistence of the death penalty laws on the books of 35 states and the federal government?

The title hints at the most provocative part of Garland’s answer. In American history, the “peculiar institution” is slavery. Anyone who thinks its vestiges were wiped out by the Emancipation Proclamation or civil rights laws should read this book and think again.