Abstract
The issue of the death penalty has been an area of enormous academic and political ferment in the United States over the last 40 years, with the country flirting with abolition in the 1970s, followed by a period of renewed use of the death penalty and then a period of retrenchment, reflected in a declining number of death sentences and executions and a recent trend leading six states to abolish the death penalty in the last 6 years. Internationally, there is a steady movement away from the death penalty, which has been abolished throughout the European Union, although certain states in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Iran) and Asia (China, Singapore, Japan) have continued to use it frequently.
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Notes
- 1.
Quote is from Robert Rantool Jr. in 1846. Titus J. (1848) Reports and Addresses Upon the Subject of Capital Punishment. New York State Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment. pg. 48.
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Donohue, J.J. (2019). Death Penalty. In: Marciano, A., Ramello, G.B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Law and Economics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7753-2_21
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