The cultural uses of capital punishment

The death penalty is accepted, even popular, in precisely the way that big-league baseball and football are accepted and popular: as a spectator sport to the fans, and a competitive agon to the players, and a logo of the American way to everybody. (Anthony Amsterdam, Keynote address to the American Bar Association, 12 October 2000) THE USA: ‘THE KILLING STATE’ At the start of the 21st century, the death penalty is embedded in the legal and political fabric of American life to an extent that is hard to appreciate for the citizens of aboli-tionist nations – which is to say for most of the democratic world.1 The USA is execut-ing offenders at a rate not seen there since the 1950s. Recent acts of Congress, like recent Supreme Court rulings, have extended the reach of capital punishment and speeded up its implementation – a process encapsulated in the title of the Anti-Terrorism and Effec-tive Death Penalty Act of 1996, which restricted habeas corpus appeals and created several new capital offences. When the US government was preparing to put Timothy McVeigh to death in June 2001, in the first federal execution since 1963, there was no debate in the American media about whether McVeigh ought to be put to death: with