Executions are skyrocketing worldwide — and the U.S. can’t say sh*t about it
U.S. allies are the worst perpetrators. But when it comes to public condemnation, America doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
By Meagan Day
State-sponsored executions are at their highest level in 25 years, according to a report released this week by Amnesty International. In 2015, the report tallied 1,634 people executed worldwide — a more than 50% increase over 2014.
The real number is probably much higher, since China is estimated to be the world’s most prolific executioner, but its death toll is a closely guarded state secret. Of the countries included in the report, 89% of last year’s executions took place in Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. While these countries are no stranger to capital punishment, their 2015 stats are a dramatic increase from prior years. What we’re witnessing is an alarming surge in executions among America’s official and unofficial allies in the Middle East.
Audrey Gaughran of Amnesty International said that the United States “should speak out about a country like Pakistan using a counterterrorism justification for the horrific scale of executions.” But does the United States really have a leg to stand on here? The US is the only Western country to still use the death penalty. It keeps company with the countries mentioned above — China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan — on the list of top five executioners worldwide. How can the United States scold other countries for their use of capital punishment when the nation has fought tooth and nail for centuries to keep the practice alive?
After all, the United States doesn’t simply “still have” capital punishment, as though it were a stubborn vestige of another era, habitual and entrenched. Campaigns against capital punishment have been waged internally since the birth of the nation. The United States even dropped the practice in the 1970s, only to reinstate it a few years later.
The US has had vocal death penalty detractors since its inception, including some Founding Fathers. In 1792 Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote an essay called “On Punishing Murder by Death,” in which he argued that the death penalty “lessens the horror of taking away human life, and thereby tends to multiply murders.” He called this phenomenon the “brutalization effect.”
Rush’s ideas garnered support, and the American death penalty abolitionist movement was born. The movement wasn’t fringe: it counted among its ranks Benjamin Franklin and US Attorney General William Bradford. Abolitionism gained traction, particularly among educated white elites in the North, but pro-capital punishment voices were louder and the practice persisted.
Americans’ stance on the death penalty oscillated wildly throughout the 19th century. Abolitionists would make headway in one state, only to lose ground in another. Michigan abolished the death penalty in 1846, just as Southern states began to classify less serious crimes committed by slaves as capital offenses. Capital punishment became discretionary rather than mandatory in most states in the 1860s, and the numbers temporarily dipped. But in the 1888 the electric chair was invented, which made execution more palatable to the public, and the numbers rose again.
In the beginning of the 20th century, it looked for a brief moment like the death penalty was on its way out — between 1907 and 1917, six states abolished the practice. But it roared back to life in the 1930s, which saw more executions than any other decade in American history.
In the 1950s, European allied nations had begun to discard the practice, and abolitionists gained some ground by comparing the United States unfavorably to other Western countries. The 1960s witnessed a slew of Supreme Court cases dealing with the constitutional legality of the death penalty, and abolitionist sentiment was strong among the American populace. Finally, in 1972, the Supreme Court placed a moratorium on the death penalty in the United States. In one fell swoop, 692 death row inmates in America had their sentences commuted to life in prison.
The story could have ended there, but a conservative lawmakers fought hard to resurrect the practice. Advocates of capital punishment devised new statutes that circumvented the Supreme Court’s ruling. In 1976 Georgia, Texas and Florida took cases before the Supreme Court in hopes of overturning the capital punishment ban — and they all won. By 1977, the death penalty was back in full swing.
The Amnesty International report finds that executions in the United States are at a 25-year low, even as executions worldwide are at a 25-year high. Support for the death penalty has been slowly dropping among Americans, and the country’s death row population is shrinking. But the fact remains that 140 countries now ban the death penalty, and the United States is not one of them. The US is the only country in the Americas that still executes people. In all of Europe and Central Asia, the only country that uses the practice is Belarus, which didn’t execute anyone last year.
One point of international alliances is the ability to exert influence. Given the nature of American relations with the Middle Eastern countries fueling the current death penalty surge — to varying degrees, all are professed partners to the US in the fight against terrorism — an American condemnation might be of some value.
But the United States has chosen the death penalty time and again — even when political elites condemned the practice, even when the Supreme Court ruled against it, and even when the American people expressed disapproval. If the US were to issue such a condemnation, the subtext would be, “Do as I say, not as I do.”
