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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31401 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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When the country was majority white, I'm not sure anyone really cared if people who obviously murdered someone were put to death.

The SCOTUS-ordered moratorium on the death penalty was in place 1972-1976, at which time the US was still roughly 80% non-Hispanic white. European countries mostly abolished the death penalty back when they were still monoethnic. The other only other unquestionably first-world country to execute people on a regular basis is Singapore, which is rather notoriously not monoethnic.

So if anything, the empirical evidence points towards monoethnic countries being more abolitionist, not less.

Does China count as a first world country?

No. They are somewhere between Mexico and Thailand in GDP per capita, whether you use nominal or PPP.

They don't use it often, but Japan still has the death penalty, has executed 98 people in the last 25 years, and has done as recent as 2022. Taiwan restored the death penalty in 2010 and it enjoys substantial polling popularity.

The other only other unquestionably first-world country to execute people on a regular basis is Singapore, which is rather notoriously not monoethnic.

Japan and Taiwan both execute people often enough to qualify, no?

It's arguable. Taiwan has been executing slightly less than one person a year lately. Japan averages about three a year if you don't count the Aum Shinriyko sarin plotters - although they appear to be passing more death sentences than that given that Wikipedia says they have a backlog built up of 107 inmates on death row.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/states-landing

Looking through states that everyone agrees maintain the death penalty, there's lots of low-single digit numbers of annual executions and lots of 'carry out one execution every other year' type states. Like yes, they're much smaller than Taiwan or especially Japan, but Taiwan and Japan have much lower murder rates- and Japan in practice seems to use the death penalty for much the same things as retentionist US states. When you take that into account, a multiple murderer is possibly more likely to get the death penalty in Japan than in the US south.

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