Stuart Banner: The Death Penalty: An American History (Harvard University Press, 2002).

ISBN: 0674007514 | 408 pages | PDF


The death penalty arouses our passions as does few other issues. Some view taking another person's life as just and reasonable punishment while others see it as an inhumane and barbaric act. But the intensity of feeling that capital punishment provokes often obscures its long and varied history in this country.

Now, for the first time, we have a comprehensive history of the death penalty in the United States. Law professor Stuart Banner tells the story of how, over four centuries, dramatic changes have taken place in the ways capital punishment has been administered and experienced. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the penalty was standard for a laundry list of crimes -- from adultery to murder, from arson to stealing horses. Hangings were public events, staged before audiences numbering in the thousands, attended by women and men, young and old, black and white alike. Early on, the gruesome spectacle had explicitly religious purposes -- an event replete with sermons, confessions, and last-minute penitence -- to promote the salvation of both the condemned and the crowd. Through the nineteenth century, the execution became desacralized, increasingly secular and private, in response to changing mores. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, ironically, as it has become a quiet, sanitary, technological procedure, the death penalty is as divisive as ever.

By recreating what it was like to be the condemned, the executioner, and the spectator, Banner moves beyond the debates, to give us an unprecedented understanding of capital punishment's many meanings. As nearly four thousand inmates are now on death row, and almost one hundred are currently being executed each year, the furious debate is unlikely to diminish. The Death Penalty is invaluable in understanding the American way of the ultimate punishment.

About the Author: Stuart Banner is Norman Abrams Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles.


Reviews

"Stuart Banner's The Death Penalty is a splendidly objective achievement. Delightfully written, free of academic pretense, liberally sprinkled with apt references from contemporary sources, the book exhaustively explores the multifaceted evolution of America's penal practices." -- Elsbeth Bothe, The Baltimore Sun

"[Banner] deftly balances history and politics, crafting a book that will be valuable to anyone interested in knowing more about capital punishment, no matter what his or her views are on the ethical issues surrounding the topic." -- David Pitt, Booklist

"[The] contrast between the past and the present can now be seen with great clarity thanks to … Stuart Banner and his comprehensive book, The Death Penalty… American historians have been slow to undertake anything like a full-scale study of the subject… Banner's book does much to fill [the gaps]. His book is an important and comprehensive … treatment of the topic." -- Hugo Adam Bedau, Boston Review

"Banner … offers a persuasive examination of the evolution of capital punishment from Colonial times onward. He makes clear that the death penalty has possessed generally consistent support from the U.S. populace, although changes in the sensibilities of juries, executioners, legal theoreticians, and judges have occurred… Highly recommended." -- R.C. Cottrell, Choice

"As an historical account of capital punishment in America, the book is unmatched… The Death Penalty: An American History is a remarkable achievement. There should be little doubt that it rightfully belongs alongside the very best scholarship ever written on the controversial subject." -- Beau Breslin, Criminal Justice Review