Why is the United States such a defiant exception?
These two examples of present-day punishment are striking for many reasons—and, in a world of ethnic massacres and school shootings, easy to overlook. But perhaps the single most striking thing about them is their rarity. Capital punishment has been abolished by all the big democracies except the United States, Japan and India. A growing number of emerging democracies in Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America have also abandoned it. For large parts of the world, capital punishment is now treated as barbaric and unjustified even for the very worst criminals. In historical terms, this is a startling change. Ever since Cesare Beccaria, an Italian philosopher and reformer, proposed an end to the death penalty in a celebrated study “On Crimes and Punishments’’ in 1764, it has been a topic of continual and often acrimonious debate. Death-penalty opponents originally considered their cause as a twin to that other great Enlightenment project, the abolition of slavery, and efforts to end both
