A troubling analysis of the current slate of captial punishment in
the United States that provides useful information but displays a
fundamental antidemocratic bias. In the 1970's, the United States
entered a dark age in the history of capital punishment, according
to Zimring and Hawkins. Previous trends toward abolition were
reversed. State legislatures, responding with hostility to a
Supreme Court ruling that, in effect, had ended the death penalty,
passed laws reconstituting it. Public opinion, fearful of the chaos
that might have ensued without capital punishment, eagerly
supported its reimposition. The consequence was the largest
inflation of death-row prisoners in American history, the
capricious execution of only a few criminals, and the adoption of
lethal injection as a new form of execution that was supposed to
humanize death. Zimring and Hawkins rightly condemn these
developments, and they are informative and persuasive in their
efforts to explain why they have come about. However, when they try
to establish the moral grounds for the removal of capital
punishment, they lapse into hackneyed liberal phrases: capital
punishment violates "progressive trends," flies in the face of "the
neccesity of living up to history's demand," conflicts "with the
democratic belief in the personal value and dignity of the common
man," symbolizes the unlimited power of government over human
beings. The most concrete basis for attacking capital punishment -
the way it strikes at minorities and the poor - the authors play
down. Even more disturbing, Zimring and Hawkins argue that because
the majority of people always have embraced capital punishment,
they cannot be trusted to determine the course of change. Only
strong Federal intervention will serve; only elite leadership,
emanating from the Supreme Court, from the state and federal
executive, and from such "opinion-leading elites" as doctors and
lawyers, will stem the tide. Here, Zimring and Hawkins contradict
their democratic rhetoric with an agenda of abolition imposed
through centralized and nondemocratic methods. And they never
explain why these elites are any more trustworthy than the people
they serve. (Kirkus Reviews)
The death penalty is not simply the most serious criminal
punishment. It has been a singular social, legal, and moral problem
in the Western world over the past two hundred years. Capital
punishment is disappearing from every nation in the West except the
United States. No political science of capital punishment in the
United States has been attempted until this book. Franklin E.
Zimring and Gordon Hawkins offer a redefinition of the central
political and legal issues and a re-examination of the whole
subject in the light of the social, political, and moral conditions
of the United States in the 1980s. Lawyers, criminologists,
political scientists, and motivated general readers will find the
profile of a United States pursuing an active execution policy in
the 1980s and 1990s to be an original and compelling contribution
to the discussion of the future of the death penalty. Zimring and
Hawkins's prediction for future policy, while based on historical
precedent, is in sharp contrast to conventional wisdom about the
United States Supreme Court. This book was first published in 1986.
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