Volume 50, Number 6 · April 10, 2003
A Very Popular Penalty
By Edmund S. Morgan, Marie Morgan
The Death Penalty: An American History
by Stuart Banner
Harvard University Press, 385 pp., $29.95
Not all Americans approve of the death penalty, but apparently most of them do. Prosecuting attorneys, state and federal, score points by showing their zeal for it, as they did when it was announced that the two alleged snipers who terrorized the Washington area—John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo—had been apprehended. In the tussle for jurisdiction that followed between Virginia and Maryland, a Justice Department official assured the public that getting the death penalty would be 'a major factor in deciding where to hold the trial.' When a Maryland prosecutor was the first to file charges, Virginians asserted their claim for jurisdiction on the ground that Maryland did not execute minors, the suspect Malvo being only seventeen. In Virginia, by contrast, Muhammad and Malvo 'would both be eligible for the death penalty.'
Review, 5195 words
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