That's the title of Jesse Wegman's latest editorial column in the Sunday New York Times.
Fifty years ago this month, a young man and an older man sat down and began to plot the end of the death penalty in America.
It was an audacious idea at the time — capital punishment was right there in the Constitution, the Supreme Court had no problem with it, and public opinion remained strongly in its favor.
But to many people, the summer of 1963 represented a new world, one alive with dreams of fairness and equality. That August, across the Mall from the Lincoln Memorial, Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, a strong opponent of capital punishment, charged his 24-year-old law clerk, Alan Dershowitz, to develop the most compelling legal argument that the death penalty violated the Constitution.
“He said, ‘Don’t find me mass murderers, don’t find me serial killers,’” Mr. Dershowitz, the well-known defense lawyer, recalled recently. Mr. Dershowitz’s resulting memo, described in Evan Mandery’s excellent new book, “A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America,” drew particular attention to racial disparities in the death penalty’s application. Justice Goldberg was impressed, and he worked the memo into a dissent. But so as not to scare off his colleagues, he removed almost every reference to race.
Fifty years later, the death penalty lives on. The Supreme Court suspended it in 1972, holding that the arbitrariness of its application constituted cruel and unusual punishment. In 1976 the court reinstated it. More than 1,300 people have been executed since, but the rate has fallen over the last decade.
More on A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America, from the publisher - W.W. Norton - and from Amazon.
Earlier coverage of A Wild Justice begins at the link. Related posts are in the books category index.
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