Can we abolish the death penalty?

This week in North Philly Notes, Austin Sarat, editor of Death Penalty in Decline?, considers how attitudes about capital punishment have changed over the decades since Furman v. Georgia.

I have been studying America’s death penalty for almost 50 years. When I started doing so it seemed almost unimaginable that this country could, or would, ever give up its apparent love affair with capital punishment. In 1972, the United States Supreme Court brought a temporary halt to capital punishment in Furman v. Georgia. Four years later, however, the Court approved new procedures for deciding on death sentences and upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty. And by the 1990s, fueled by a “tough on crime” political climate, the number of death sentences and executions steadily climbed.

I have been inspired in my work on capital punishment by what Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in Furman. He believed people supported the death penalty because they did not know very much about it. Marshall argued that the more people knew about the death penalty, the less they would like it. He thought that scholars could play an important role in the work of educating the public about the grim realities of state-sponsored killing.

So I had my charge. Write about the workings of the death penalty system. Inform my fellow citizens about what the government does when it puts people to death.

I have written many books and scholarly articles about America’s death penalty. Recently, I added to my repertoire a series of op eds and commentaries designed to make my scholarship accessible to a public audience. I have not been alone in this work. Many distinguished scholars have lent their voices to the conversation about capital punishment. Lawyers, activists, and politicians have done the crucial work of mobilizing opposition to state killing.

They have alerted us to the fallibility of, and flaws in, the death penalty system. Sixty-three percent of the American public now believe that an innocent person has been executed in the past five years, and confronting the sheer fact of miscarriages of justice has led many Americans to reconsider their views about the death penalty. The fear of executing the innocent, the continuing specter of racial discrimination in the death penalty system, and the difficulties encountered with lethal injection executions have led to the perception that the death penalty system is broken from start to finish.

As a result, what was unimaginable 50 years ago is today very much on the horizon of possibility, namely that the United States may soon find a way to live without the death penalty. Indeed, it is fair to say that we are in the midst of a national reconsideration of capital punishment and on the road to its abolition. Signs of progress in the fight against capital punishment are everywhere.

Since 2007, more states have abolished the death penalty than at any other 17-year period in American history. As the Death Penalty Information Center noted in its 2022 annual report, “public support for capital punishment and jury verdicts for death remained near fifty-year lows. Defying conventional political wisdom, nearly every measure of change—from new death sentences imposed and executions conducted to public opinion polls and election results—pointed to the continuing durability of the more than 20-year sustained decline of the death penalty in the United States.”

The Death Penalty in Decline? looks back over the last half-century and offers an analysis of the enduring significance of Furman. It takes up the facts of the present moment in the hope of offering a portrait of where we are on the road to abolition. It continues the work that Justice Marshall inspired.  

Honoring Juneteenth

This week in North Philly Notes, we honor Juneteenth with a look at Beverly Tomek’s Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania, and other African American titles.

Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania by Beverly C. Tomek, tells the complex story of the role of slavery in the founding and growth of the Commonwealth. 

Tomek corrects the long-held notion that slavery in the North was “not so bad” as, or somehow “more humane” than, in the South due to the presence of abolitionists. The book begins with the story of slavery in colonial Pennsylvania and then traces efforts to end human bondage in the state. It then explores the efforts of Pennsylvania reformers to reconstruct the state in a way that would make room for the newly freed persons. Finally, it traces Pennsylvania’s role in the national antislavery movement, debunking the myth that Pennsylvania faded into the background in the 1830s as Massachusetts abolitionists took center stage. The story Tomek offers is one of a state that was built upon enslaved labor but had a large enough reform community to challenge that system within the state’s borders by passing the nation’s first abolition law and then to try to spread antislavery throughout the country.  

Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania traces this movement from its beginning to the years immediately following the American Civil War. Discussions of the complexities of the state’s antislavery movement illustrate how different groups of Pennsylvanians followed different paths in an effort to achieve their goal. Tomek also examines the backlash abolitionists and Black Americans faced. In addition, she considers the civil rights movement from the period of state reconstruction through the national reconstruction that occurred after the Civil War, and she concludes by analyzing what Pennsylvania’s history of race relations means for the state today. 

While the past few decades have shed light on enslavement and slavery in the South, much of the story of northern slavery remains hidden. Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania tells the full and inclusive story of this history, bringing the realities of slavery, abolition, and Pennsylvania’s attempt to reconstruct its post-emancipation society. 

Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery, by Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, illustrates what freedom looked like for black Americans in the Civil War era
Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work—Non-Fiction, 2014
One of the Top 25 Outstanding Academic Titles, Choice, 2013

In their pioneering book, Envisioning Emancipation, renowned photographic historian Deborah Willis and historian of slavery Barbara Krauthamer have amassed 150 photographs—some never before published—from the antebellum days of the 1850s through the New Deal era of the 1930s. The authors vividly display the seismic impact of emancipation on African Americans born before and after the Proclamation, providing a perspective on freedom and slavery and a way to understand the photos as documents of engagement, action, struggle, and aspiration.

Upon the Ruins of Liberty: Slavery, the President’s House at Independence National Historical Park, and Public Memory, by Roger C. Aden, provides a behind-the-scenes look at the development of the memorial to slavery in Independence Mall.

Upon the Ruins of Liberty chronicles the politically charged efforts to create a fitting tribute to the place where George Washington (and later John Adams) shaped the presidency as he denied freedom to the nine enslaved Africans in his household. From design to execution, the plans prompted advocates to embrace stories informed by race and address such difficulties as how to handle the results of the site excavation. Consequently, this landmark project raised concerns and provided lessons about the role of public memory in shaping the nation’s identity.

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