"Only a Governor Can Make Executions Happen"

"Beginning in the late 1960s, he argues, Republicans strategically wielded the death penalty as a potent wedge issue to wean Southerners off the Democratic Party, and as a shorthand way to brandish their law-and-order credentials and their commitment to state’s rights. Capital punishment served as a political euphemism to express a yearning for the good ol’ days before the civil rights movement upended race relations in the United States. For 'new' Democrats such as Clinton, it was a convenient and indirect way to distance themselves from the liberal grab bag of busing, multiculturalism, the Great Society, and some of the party’s other signature issues.
"Garland singles out the exceptional nature of American political institutions and the political culture that nourishes them to explain why the United States, seemingly a fellow traveler with much of the West on the road to abolition in the 1960s, veered off toward retention."

In The New Republic, Marie Gottschalk reviews David Garland's Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition.