The restoration of capital punishment in 1976 was based on a fantasy of fairness. It must be abolished<\/p>\n
Thursday will mark the 50th anniversary of the rebirth of the death penalty in the United States. On 2 July 1976, the supreme court handed down decisions<\/a> in five cases that laid out a formula for passing constitutional muster.<\/p>\n The formula the court devised and explained at length in one of those cases, Gregg v Georgia<\/a>, was built on a wish and a prayer. It was a fantasy of fairness, powerful enough, its authors thought, to keep capital punishment alive<\/a> and to lend it legitimacy, but it was a fantasy nonetheless.<\/p>\n Austin Sarat, associate dean of the faculty and William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America\u2019s Death Penalty<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The restoration of capital punishment in 1976 was based on a fantasy of fairness. It must be abolished Thursday will mark the 50th anniversary of the rebirth of the death penalty in the United States. On 2 July 1976, the supreme court handed down decisions in five cases that laid out a formula for passing … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75637"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75637\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}