An Examination Of The U.S. Death Penalty

The United States has a uniqueness of the death penalty culture, which differs from any other western industrialized countries. She remains the only Western democracy to retain the death penalty in the twenty-first century. In the United States, each state was free to choose the conduct subject to punishment as well as the punishments to be imposed, and this discretion extended as well to the penalty of death only if these punishments do not violate relative federal law. However, the institution of the death penalty, inherited from English colonel, not only has harmful effects on the American society and its foreign affairs, but also becomes even a menace to the whole American democratic institution. Whether it should be abolished or retained is today one of the most heated debated issues in the United States. First of all, an indisputable fact is that the institution of the death penalty does exist today. On the other hand, evidence shows that the support for the death penalty has been decreasing since the beginning of the twenty-first century. So is the use of the U.S. death penalty. Thus, it is only right and natural for people to ask why the death penalty is so enduring in the United States and what its current status is and its future will be.With eight chapters, this paper tries to find answers to these questions from a cultural perspective.Chapter One is devoted to an overview of the U.S. current death penalty status. In this overview, statistics are cited and the causes for such a peculiar status are analyzed. The main cause is due process tradition, one of the most rooted American traditions.Chapter Two intends to trail the brief history of the U.S. death penalty and survey its evolution in this history.Chapter Three is dedicated to surveying the long-standing U.S. death penalty and its contributing factors from the policy and cultural environment respectively. The greater force of the American vigilante tradition and the greater expression of these values generated in the American federal system are the major causes for the persistence of this institution.Chapter Four delves deeper into the issue by summarizing those underlying factors weakening this institution as a criminal punishment in the United States. This chapter probes into the causes for the decreasing role of the U.S. death penalty from...