Death Penalty has always held popular support in the United States since the colonial days. While majority of the countries have abolished the death penalty, America continues to remain a prominent protagonist for the death penalty. This essay evaluates Sangmin Bae’s article, The Death Penalty and the Peculiarity of American Political Institutions. Bae has correctly identified two major features of American political organization that make continuance of death penalty policy acceptable namely: federalism and electoral politics” (Bae 236-237). In the American federal system, each state has its own constitution and its own state courts and each is fiercely possessive of its independence. The US constitution allows states to impose any penalty that it deems fit. With a frontier background where capital punishment was an accepted norm of life, coupled with a federal structure, American federal government has been constrained in taking any decision to abolish the death penalty. Added to the federal structure is also the fact that most political appointees in America are directly elected. Thus a directly elected politician is answerable to his or her constituency who may not elect the leader next time around if the politician takes a contrarian view of a sensitive issue. Public support for the death penalty has continued to remain high with “two in three Americans supporting it” (Bae 236). The last American presidential candidate to have championed against the death penalty, Michael Dukakis lost to George Bush and since that day no presidential candidate Republican or Democrat has ever raised the issue of abolition of death penalty. So any change in the US stance on the continuance of death penalty can only change when American public opinion changes against the death penalty. While Bae has taken a political analytical approach at identifying the reasons for support of death penalty in the U.S. Edward Koch adopts a hard-nosed realist approach to the issue of death penalty. According to Koch death penalty must be supported if the society aims to diminish murder, the most flagrant form of injustice (Koch 2). Koch’s entire argument is based on the efficacy of the death penalty in being a deterrent and the need to provide equitable justice to the victims. The Political Research Associates (2005) have very pithily observe that “this “tougher” and harsher (U.S.) stance is not as effective as approaches of other nations where the focus is “more on crime prevention and rehabilitation” (Political Research Associates 1).
In the final analysis, it can be concluded that Bae’s analysis on the reasons why death penalty has not yet been abolished in the U.S. are logical and correct, while Koch’s analysis magnifies the sentiments of the American people who see the necessity of equitable justice being done, the systemic deficiencies of the American system versus the European criminal justice system have not been sufficiently discussed as the articles do not explain how the softer approach and nil death penalty in European countries have succeeded in lower murder rates than the U.S. despite its hard approach.
Works Cited
Bae, Sangmin. “The Death Penalty and the Peculiarity of American Political Institutions.” Huma Rights Rev (2008) (2007): 233-240.
Koch, Edward I. “Death and Justice.” The New Republic (1985): 1-3.
Political Research Associates. United States Versus the World. 2005. Web.