 States declined to vote alongside a record number of countries in the United Nations General Assembly for a worldwide moratorium on executions in November 2012 (DPIC "UN Death Penalty Resolution" 2013).
It has been suggested that the United States and European nations “are now farther divided on the question of capital punishment than on any other morally significant question of government policy" (Zimring 2003, 181). While the United States saw the abolition of the death penalty recently in Connecticut in 2012 and Maryland in 2013, thirty-two American states still retain execution as a punishment for murder (DPIC "Year End Report" 2012). Since American support for the death penalty has declined substantially from 80 percent in 1994 to 63 percent in 2012 (Gallup 2012), it is an appropriate time to isolate the roots of America's staunch retention of the death penalty. Without providing a value judgment on the appropriateness of the death penalty as a policy, this paper simply seeks to apply a high level of scrutiny to an often overlooked but significant policy divergence in the Western world. An informed explanation of America's retention of the policy begins with the basic question: what explains variation in a Western democracy's retention or abolition of the death penalty?
This paper will begin with Section (1), a literature review of the major theories that past scholars and social scientists have put forth in regards to death penalty politics in modern Western democracies. Section (2) presents a joint hypothesis that was constructed based on recent academic literature in the field. Section (3) provides an overview of the methodology employed to test the hypothesis and Section (4) states the findings. Section (5) explores implications of the findings on the sustainability of death penalty abolition in Europe and potential death penalty abolition in the United States. Section (6) acknowledges the limitations of the study and puts forth suggestions for future research. Finally, Section (7) provides a conclusion and a look to the future of transatlantic death penalty politics in the 21st century.
The first step in this academic inquiry is to examine the popularly cited answers to America's idiosyncratic retention of the death penalty and assess their merit in the social science field. Two variables that are often discussed in the public forum are the nation's homicide rate and the influence of special interests. The most common kneejerk explanation for America's retention of the death penalty is the assertion that high homicide rates, spurred by lack of gun control and urban crime, make the death penalty a more urgent mechanism than in small European nations. While the United States homicide rate is higher than most European countries, the national murder rate has dropped dramatically from almost 10% in 1990 to 4.7% in 2011 (DPIC "Murder Rates Nationally and By State" 2013). Additionally, if high homicide rates are a compelling variable for death penalty retention, the internal state-by-state trends of abolition in America offer an entirely contradictory trend. For example, Maryland, a state with one of the highest murder rates at 7.5%, just abolished the death penalty in 2013. Meanwhile Texas, a state with a murder rate of only 4.4%, retains and actively uses the death penalty. In this way, the homicide rate answer does not emerge as a prominent variable.
Secondly, individuals are often apt to attribute retention of any potentially outdated policy to the influence of special interests, in this case a lack of power in the anti-death penalty advocacy community. Ironically, the United States was one of the success sites for death penalty reformers led by Cesare Beccaria's doctrine in the 1780s (Hood & Hoyle, 11). While the policy decisions on the death penalty in European nations were certainly influenced by lobbying groups and the political advocacy of leaders like Sydney Silverman in Great Britain, neither actors can compare to the massive influence of lobbyist giants like Amnesty International and the American Civil Li