An American Dilemma pp 23-39 | Cite as
The Legal Framework: Capital Punishment Law and the Rights of Foreign Nationals
Abstract
Institutions, as Robert Garland has written, are the result of historical developments and are influenced by the political, social, and cultural environment. Those institutions, in turn, help to shape the environment. “Punishment,” Garland states, “is a social institution composed of interlinked processes of law-making, conviction, sentencing, and the administration of penalties. It involves discursive frameworks of authority and condemnation, ritual procedures of imposing punishment, a repertoire of penal sanctions, institutions and agencies for the enforcement of sanctions, and a rhetoric of symbols, figures, and images by means of which penal policy is represented to its wider a udiences.”1 In the United States, the social institution that is capital punishment sets the nation apart from many comparable nations. Judith Randle contends that the death penalty is a cultural artifact that “reflects and reproduces contemporary American requisites and constructions of the social world” with deeper social and personal significance. She is critical of how support for capital punishment is “fueled by a nasty underbelly of fear, vengeance, and disregard for criminals’ lives,” feelings created from images of evildoers as unredeemable.2 Perhaps because of the practice of dehumanizing offenders and unlike the conversation about the death penalty in many other countries, the American debate has seldom included recognizing it as a violation of human rights. Rather, much of the discussion has centered on procedure.
Keywords
Death Penalty Federal Court State Court Foreign National Vienna ConventionPreview
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Notes
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