The scourge of the death penalty hangs over America | Austin Sarat
The restoration of capital punishment in 1976 was based on a fantasy of fairness. It must be abolished
Thursday will mark the 50th anniversary of the rebirth of the death penalty in the United States. On 2 July 1976, the supreme court handed down decisions in five cases that laid out a formula for passing constitutional muster.
The formula the court devised and explained at length in one of those cases, Gregg v Georgia, was built on a wish and a prayer. It was a fantasy of fairness, powerful enough, its authors thought, to keep capital punishment alive and to lend it legitimacy, but it was a fantasy nonetheless.
Austin Sarat, associate dean of the faculty and William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty
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