Is a Deadly Culture Honorable?

?Capital_punishment (1)

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A world map showing countries according to their federal law regarding death penalty.
Map by Eduardo Sellan III and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Imbued with their own form of patriotism, many Americans fervently link words like freedom, liberty, and democracy with that hallowed term the United States; however, to capture well the character of some major parts of the nation, they need to include the word punitiveness.

The map above shows the United States in bed with China, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea, and several other nations not banning capital punishment. Japan is the only industrial democracy besides the United States that retains a death penalty. The General Assembly of the United Nations, as recently as 2014, has called for a global moratorium on capital punishment. The US consistently opposes the initiative, and continues to execute people, some of them innocent, in very nasty ways.

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Map of Death Penalty State statutes in the United States.
Map is in the public domain.

As can be seen in the second map, support for capital punishment is by no means distributed equally throughout the United States. Indeed, since 1976, when the US Supreme Court reinstituted the death penalty, most of the 1411 individuals put to death (including 15 women and 22 juveniles) were executed in only 2% of all the counties in the US. Texas performed the most executions, but Duval County, FL, has been the killingest.

What is going on in those counties? Is their disproportionate number of executions the result of incompetence and prosecutorial misconduct?

Or is it something deeper? Is the disproportionate killing of people of color another outcome of pervasive racism in the US?

Is the capital punishment rate, like the murder rate, a symptom of a “culture of honor”? Are both rates, which are disproportionately higher in the South, largely bi-products of “cultures of honor” and an associated desire for retribution, the old idea of an eye for an eye and “just deserts” for unwanted behavior—an eagerness to punish that is impervious to the fact that sometimes innocent people are convicted of crimes?

Stay tuned for a post on the door that Supreme Court Justice Stephan Breyer may have opened to reconsideration of the national shame called capital punishment.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology