Capital Punishment and the Legacies of Slavery and Lynching in the United States

David Rigby and Charles Seguin

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2021, vol. 694, issue 1, 205-219

Abstract: Capital punishment in the United States is racialized: those convicted of the murder of Whites are much more likely to receive the death penalty than those convicted for the murder of Blacks. Capital punishment is more commonly practiced in places where lynching of Blacks occurred more frequently and in states in which slavery was legal as of 1860. Accordingly, scholars have debated whether capital punishment reflects a legacy of lynching or a legacy of slavery. Our analysis shows that lynching on its own is a significant predictor of contemporary executions, but that once slavery is accounted for, slavery predicts executions, while lynching does not. We argue that slavery’s state-level institutional legacy is central to contemporary capital punishment.

Keywords: lynching; lynching legacies; collective violence; violence; slavery; executions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00027162211016277 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:694:y:2021:i:1:p:205-219

DOI: 10.1177/00027162211016277

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().