Why the European Model Failed in the United States

Abstract

The global death penalty abolition movement’s most spectacular failure has been the United States. The U.S. is not the only industrialized democracy to retain capital punishment (Japan also has the death penalty), nor is it the largest retentionist country (India and China are both retentionist). Yet the perception remains that the United States — with its European roots and Western legal system — somehow ‘should’ have abolished capital punishment by now: ‘[America’s] stubborn attachment to capital punishment puzzles Europeans, who see abolition as a logical outgrowth of democratic development and who are mystified about why a country so similar to themselves in so many ways can behave so differently’ (Schabas 2003:21). Executions in China or the Arab world are one thing; those parts of the world, it is said, operate against dramatically different cultural backgrounds and expectations. Europeans do not directly address the Chinese population, urging it to abolish capital punishment based on ‘shared values’ but, in 2000, two French activists addressed to the ‘people of the United States’ a book-length open letter urging abolition. Its real audience may be guessed at by the fact that it was written in French (Menasce and Taube 2000). A recent study argued that much of the ‘puzzlement’ at America’s failure to abolish capital punishment stems from a problem of perspective: ‘this literature sees the United States as exceptional and seeks to explain its distinctiveness in terms of American political institutions and culture without explaining abolition in Europe’ (Greenberg and West 2008:312, emphasis added). Having at least tried to remedy the methodological flaw identified by Greenberg and West, I am now in a position to analyze America’s unsuccessful movement to abolish capital punishment by using the illuminating contrast with Europe’s success.