Book Review: The Death Penalty: An American History

• Author: Beau Breslin
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016806291180
• Published date: 01 June 2006
• Date: 01 June 2006
• Subject Matter: Articles

Book Reviews 179

As an academic with an interest in corrections, I was seduced by the title of this book,

thinking it to be an examination of the nation’s jail systems. Instead, I found it to be, with

two notable exceptions, a series of chapters bemoaning the fact that the federal government

regulates commerce published by an institute with a political agenda. The two exceptions

are Lynch’s chapter on pollution and Luna’s chapter on sentencing guidelines. One cannot

read Lynch’s article without becoming concerned about the potential and actual abuse of

power by federal regulatory agencies. We should not, however, lose sight of the fact that

government regulations are often developed in response to serious abuses. Luna clearly

identifies numerous problems that have emerged in the use of federal sentencing guidelines.

I have learned much from this book but do not recommend it unless it is accompanied by

a work that presents the government’s side.

Magnus Seng

Loyola University, Chicago

The Death Penalty: An American History, by Stuart Banner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2002. 385 pp.

DOI: 10.1177/0734016806291180

For many Americans, the country’s love affair with capital punishment is perplexing.

Consider a few paradoxes. The United States has witnessed many of its allies in the indus-

trialized world successfully abolish the death penalty, and yet it has defiantly maintained that

the practice of execution still serves important penological and moral objectives. The same

country that boasts that it is unmatched in its commitment to freedom and tolerance—the

United States—puts more criminals to death than all regimes around the world except China,

Iran, and Vietnam. The same country that prides itself on vigorously defending the rights of

criminal defendants—again, the United States—endorses state and federal legislation that

expedites and limits the appeals process for death row inmates. The same country that insists

on the deterrent effect of the death penalty moves executions indoors where all but a few

invited guests profit from viewing the event firsthand. I could go on, but you get the picture.

Stuart Banner is one of those confused Americans, and his book The Death Penalty: An

American History is an attempt to use the prism of history to highlight these, and many other,

paradoxes. As he remarks, the work is primarily focused on

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. (p. 3)

He sets out to compile close to 400 years of history surrounding capital punishment into a

little more than 300 pages. Beginning with a discussion in chapter 1 of the transplantation

of English penal customs into the colonies and concluding with a description of the “con-

stitutionalization” of capital punishment during the past three decades, Banner transports

the reader to different times in this country’s historical development when support for