Abstract
Institutions, as Robert Garland has written, are the result of historical developments and are influenced by the political, social, and cultural environment. Those institutions, in turn, help to shape the environment. “Punishment,” Garland states, “is a social institution composed of interlinked processes of law-making, conviction, sentencing, and the administration of penalties. It involves discursive frameworks of authority and condemnation, ritual procedures of imposing punishment, a repertoire of penal sanctions, institutions and agencies for the enforcement of sanctions, and a rhetoric of symbols, figures, and images by means of which penal policy is represented to its wider a udiences.”1 In the United States, the social institution that is capital punishment sets the nation apart from many comparable nations. Judith Randle contends that the death penalty is a cultural artifact that “reflects and reproduces contemporary American requisites and constructions of the social world” with deeper social and personal significance. She is critical of how support for capital punishment is “fueled by a nasty underbelly of fear, vengeance, and disregard for criminals’ lives,” feelings created from images of evildoers as unredeemable.2 Perhaps because of the practice of dehumanizing offenders and unlike the conversation about the death penalty in many other countries, the American debate has seldom included recognizing it as a violation of human rights. Rather, much of the discussion has centered on procedure.
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Notes
Quoted in Austin Sarat and Christian Boulanger, The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment: Comparative Perspectives (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 11.
Judith Randle, “The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment in the United States,” in The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment: Comparative Perspectives, eds. Austin Sarat and Christian Boulanger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 93, 95.
William A. Schabus, The Abolition of the Death Penalty in International Law, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 6–7.
William A. Schabus, “The United Nations and the Abolition of the Death Penalty,” in Against the Death Penalty: International Initiatives and Implications, ed. Jon Yorke (Surrey, England: Ashgate Press, 2008), 12.
Sangmin Bae, When the State No Longer Kills: International Human Rights Norms and Abolition of Capital Punishment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 2–6.
See James J. Megivern, The Death Penalty: An Historical and Theological Survey (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1997).
Michael Ignatieff, “Introduction,” in American Exceptionalism and Human Rights, ed. Michael Ignatieff (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 4–7.
Joseph S. Nye Jr., The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 54.
Franklin E. Zimring, The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 71.
David R. Dow, Executed on a Technicality: Lethal Injustice on America’s Death Row (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 42.
David R. Dow, “Introduction,” in Machinery of Death: The Reality of America’s Death Penalty Regime, eds. David R. Dow and Mark Dow (New York: Routledge, 2002), 5.
Frank I. Michelman, “Integrity-Anxiety?” in American Exceptionalism and Human Rights, ed. Michael Ignatieff (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 241.
Frederick Schauer, “The Exceptional First Amendment,” in American Exceptionalism and Human Rights, ed. Michael Ignatieff (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 51.
David R. Dow “How the Death Penalty Really Works,” in Machinery of Death: The Reality of America’s Death Penalty Regime, eds. David R. Dow and Mark Dow (New York: Routledge, 2002), 31.
Mark Tushnet, A Court Divided: The Rehnquist Court and the Future of Constitutional Law (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 276.
Michael John Garcia, Vienna Convention on Consular Relations: Overview of U.S. Implementation and International Court of Justice Interpretation of Consular Notification Requirements (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2004), 3.
Luke T. Lee and John Quigley, Consular Law and Practice, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 141–42.
Quoted in Gregory Dean Gisvold, “Strangers in a Strange Land: Assessing the Fate of Foreign Nationals in the United States by State and Local Authorities,” Minnesota Law Review 78 (1993–1994): 779.
William J. Aceves, “The Vienna Convention on Consular Relations: A Study of Rights, Wrongs, and Remedies,” Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 31, no. 2 (March 1998): 268.
Ronan Doherty, “Foreign Affairs v. Federalism: How State Control of Criminal Law Implicated Federal Responsibility under International Law,” Virginia Law Review 82 (1996): 1345.
Alan W. Clarke and Laurelyn Whitt, The Bitter Fruit of American Justice: International and Domestic Resistance to the Death Penalty (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2007), 55.
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© 2015 Mary Welek Atwell
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Atwell, M.W. (2015). The Legal Framework: Capital Punishment Law and the Rights of Foreign Nationals. In: An American Dilemma. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137270375_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137270375_3
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