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Book Review
| Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American Story, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. ix + 385. $29.95, cloth (ISBN 0-674-00751-4); $15.95, paper (ISBN 0-674-01083-3).
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| Stuart Banner's new book on capital punishment in America represents an important addition to a debate that rages with renewed intensity today. He boldly confronts the challenge of writing a history that covers not only three centuries but also multiple jurisdictions. The work is well researched and carefully thought out. His most important contribution is to demonstrate that, while people have been debating the subject for over two hundred years, the controversy has varied in intensity and direction. "This book," Banner alerts us, "is about the many changes in capital punishment over the years—changes in the arguments pro and con, in the crimes punished with death, in execution methods and rituals, and more generally in the way Americans have understood and experienced the death penalty" (3). An historical perspective is much needed at this moment, for, as he notes, the debate seems to be deadlocked, and it is difficult to see how the "stalemate" can be broken (310). If Banner is unsure as well, he nonetheless provides us with much new information that forces us to reexamine some of our old assumptions and to think more critically about how the death penalty became so peculiarly "an American story." |
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Banner begins his study with several compelling chapters aimed at recapturing the meaning of the death penalty for early modern society. Elements of this story have been available before, especially for Europe, but he is creative in filling in the details for colonial America. He emphasizes how profoundly different the death penalty was for this society. "An execution was outside, open to the public, and embedded in ritual; now it is behind closed doors, accessible only to a few, with as little ceremony as possible" (3). Death, far from being casual, was invested with ceremony and drenched in religious significance. It offered a grand drama of sin and redemption that was meant to instruct, inspire, and warn. The presence of the crowd and the active participation of the condemned were crucial to its purpose. Banner examines the execution from all sides, describing the experience of the victims as well as the rhetoric of the authorities. He discovers new sources that throw fresh light on the complex rituals aimed not only at deterring crime but also at purging the land of blood and securing the salvation of the condemned. He is even interested in the place of the symbolic execution, the occasions when offenders sat at the gallows with a rope around their necks, within the general economy of death. There is a richness to this discussion that historians of colonial America will find rewarding. |
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The remaining sections of his book take up the history of the gradual transformation of this regime. The tale contains many twists and turns, but the general pattern is clear. Doubts came to be expressed in the eighteenth century about many aspects of capital punishment, especially the fact that it was imposed for so many offenses. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, states moved to restrict it to murder. For vocal reformers, this new limit appeared inadequate, and they pressed legislatures for the total abolition of the punishment. They seldom gained their goal. Still, by this time, the basic terms for the death penalty debate had been established. The century also saw the ending of public executions as well as the search for new technologies of death. Discontent, however, tended to ebb and flow. One wave of reform crested in the early twentieth century, only to be followed by several decades of renewed resort to capital punishment. By the middle of the century, the frequency of executions was in decline all across the country, and abolitionists began to dream that their final victory could not be long delayed. America seemed in step with Europe, where one nation after another ended the punishment. In the 1970s, however, the United States set off on a dramatically different path. |
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In the final third of his book, Banner offers a useful summary of the drama that unfolded in America during the last half of the twentieth century. In 1972 the Supreme Court declared the existing practice of the death penalty unconstitutional, while in 1976, in the face of a massive public outcry, the Court voted to restore it. Banner rightly emphasizes precisely how radical this transformation of capital punishment into a constitutional issue was and how dramatic were the consequences that flowed from this development for all involved in the controversy. "From the late eighteenth century through the middle of the twentieth the movement had been political, aimed at persuading legislatures to replace the death penalty with prison. In the last three decades of the twentieth century the movement was largely legal—dominated by lawyers, who spent almost all their time litigating cases" (292). The location of the debate and the means of argument changed decisively as a result. The outcome, he argues, has been frustrating and destructive for all sides. |
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Banner's sweeping overview of the history of the death penalty in America is more complete than anything we have had to date. He has sketched for us the main outline of the story and has made us more sensitive to its complex character. Still, his explanation for why change occurred remains thin, especially in the latter half of his account. For instance, he devotes a long chapter to a detailed discussion of changes in the technology of death, from the electric chair and gas chamber to lethal injection. Yet, he has little to say about the American fascination with such technologies beyond claiming that the driving force was the search for a less painful death. Similarly, he contends that the situation with respect to capital punishment at a given time depends on which of two ideas was dominant in the culture: the belief in retribution grounded in a conviction in free will or the belief that environment shapes conduct and so diminishes responsibility. Since the early nineteenth century, he argues, the debate over death has been a contest between two "competing understandings of human nature" (114). But Banner tells us nothing about how these two positions have changed over time, nor does he discuss why one grips the mind more strongly at a particular moment. It is strange that the author, who gives us such a rich and nuanced account of the meaning of the death penalty in colonial America, has so much less to say about the culture of the death penalty in the twentieth century. Religion, which he acknowledges as so important earlier, suddenly drops out of the story. The South, for him, counts as little more than a region with a troubled racial past and a tendency to violence, not as a place with a distinctive cultural identity. In every respect, Banner's account narrows as it draws near to the present, focusing on technology and constitutional debate rather than examining the cultural currents and political shifts that have produced the present dilemma. |
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Despite these reservations, Banner's achievement is considerable. His book is the kind of intervention by a historian that is long overdue. If he has no easy answers to offer, he has deepened our understanding of the predicament in which we find ourselves. |
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| Randall McGowen
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| University of Oregon |
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