America's Unique
History of Death Penalty Practices

How did the United States come to be the only independent Western democracy still applying the death penalty today? That's the central question that The Hangman's Knot addresses. This book is about punishment, politics, and how they worked together over some 300 years to create a unique history of death penalty use. Execution is now imposed on so few convicted murderers (fewer than one percent) that some defense attorneys call it cruel and unusual punishment. But death is still on the books in 38 of our 50 states.Texas, Virginia, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Delaware have the highest rates of execution—between one and two persons per 100,000 general population—and the first four of these states, because of their large populations and high rates, accounted for 60 per cent of over 880 executions in the United States from 1977 through 2003.

Equal protection under the law? That's what our Constitution says all citizens are entitled to—as spelled out in the Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1868. But equal protection would be a lot to ask, considering that our current public attitudes draw on collective violence in the past. Included are such incidents from the history of death penalty use as the Salem witch trials (1692) and the San Francisco vigilante "executions" of the 1850s. The Hangman's Knot demonstrates how out-of-office cliques and ambitious politicians seized, or used, the power to execute as a way of intimidating their rivals and the voters who supported these rivals. Slavery, terrorism by the post-Civil-War Ku Klux Klan, industry's persecution of organized labor, and Southern white dominance-by-lynching into the Civil Rights era: all of these depended on enforcement by death.

Today, the death penalty is not even repression. It has become sheer tokenism. No evidence shows that it deters murder or has done so historically. The Hangman's Knot details, with illustrations, true personal stories, facts, and figures, why half our population clings to the idea that execution is useful. For whom does it still serve a purpose? Is the United States entering a fourth era of opposition to the death penalty? The Hangman's Knot is intended for readers who want to decide for themselves what to think—and who wonder whether opponents will succeed today where they failed during three past eras of abolition.

America's Unique History of Death Penalty Practices

America's Unique
History of Death Penalty Practices