mocratic states with an enormous breadth of political dispositions and diversity. A central tenet of the American federal institution is the emphasis on states' rights, which is based on a fundamental respect for local determinism. In contrast, Great Britain, like many other European democracies, is a smaller, more centralized parliamentary democracy. This structural distinction is important because, while Great Britain can only abolish the death penalty on a federal level, the American federal government has the default option of letting the contentious issue work itself out in the state legislatures. Since only eighteen American states have abolished the death penalty (DPIC "Year End Report" 2012), this procedural strain alone could account for the United States lagging behind its European counterparts in death penalty abolition.
While the United States is sometimes referred to as one of the most direct representative democracies in the world, the British democracy is complemented and influenced by political relics from a time past. The British government still involves their constitutional monarchy and maintains a House of Lords, a legislative body with hereditary and appointed members. While the British House of Commons certainly supplements the political structure with elected representatives, it is important to note that even the most democratic legislative body in Great Britain is not held hostage by public sentiment. For example, the Prime Minister has the power to set the date of general elections as long as it does not exceed a five-year gap. While the United States attempts to create some distance from the public with six-year terms in the Senate as opposed to the diminutive two-year House of Representatives terms, even U.S. Senators are given no where near the political flexibility afforded British government officials.
Early Historical Roots
Despite these structural differences, the shared historical roots of capital punishment in Great Britain and the United States can be traced back as far as American independence. In fact, the ceremony of public execution in colonial America was modeled after that of early modern England and Continental Europe. When the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria made waves in Europe with his treatise against capital punishment On Crimes and Punishment in 1794, the Founding Father Benjamin Rush, sometimes referred to as the “American Beccaria,” adopted and utilized these ideas in his push for abolition in America. The United States and Great Britain followed a similar timeline with the privatization of execution in the 19th century. As the masses became increasingly uncomfortable with the concept of public execution, the ceremony was moved behind closed doors. Privatization occurred in most major European countries from 1850 to 1870 and in the Northeastern region of the United States between 1830 and 1860 (Spierenburg 2011, 21).
Although some states like Rhode Island and Wisconsin abolished the death penalty altogether in the mid-1800s, it was not until the Progressive Period that America started to see a significant shift in state policy. In the first two decades of the 20th century, six states officially abolished capital punishment and many others imposed strict restrictions on its application (DPIC “History of the Death Penalty" 2013). Until the 1970s, political discourse in America on the death penalty concentrated largely on classifying capital crimes and debating different humane execution methods. The dialogue hardly touched the option of abolition. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, abolitionist campaigns had pushed the British Parliament to severely limit the use of capital punishment in the Homicide Act of 1957.
1960s-1970s: The Reflective Moratorium
1. Great Britain: A Successful Moratorium
Historical trends with respect to the death penalty in the United States and Great Britain followed a parallel evolution until a critical period, the mid-1960s. In 1965, the British Parliament voted to suspend the death penalty for an experimental five-year period with the Murder (Abolitio