Thoughts on the Death Penalty

Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens reviews a new book written on the death penalty. Justice Stevens was a consistent critic of capital punishment; he resigned from the Court in 2010: David Garland is a well-respected sociologist and legal scholar who taught courses on crime and punishment at the University of Edinburgh before relocating to the United States over a decade ago. His recent Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition is the product of his attempt to learn “why the United States is such an outlier in the severity of its criminal sentencing.”