Death in Venice. Joshua Micah Marshall: “It’s true that all of America’s

G-7 partners, save Japan, have abolished capital

punishment, but the reason isn’t, as death-penalty

opponents usually assume, that their populations eschew

vengeance. In fact, opinion polls show that Europeans

and Canadians crave executions almost as much as their

American counterparts do. It’s just that their politicians

don’t listen to them. In other words, if these countries’

political cultures are morally superior to America’s, it’s

because they’re less democratic.” The essayist tries to show that the death penalty opponents’ argument is flawed, but IMHO it’s his that is flawed. He wants to set up the straw man argument that liberals always claim to ‘speak for the “little guy,” the “working family,” or, in Al

Gore’s recent phraseology, “the people, not the

powerful” ‘, to claim that liberal opponents of the capital punishment are hypocritical. But no death penalty opponent I’ve ever known or read argues that it’s the will of the masses! They say that it’s morally preferable and our legislators should rise to a higher standard, precisely as Marshall describes is the case in western Europe and Canada. Impassioned political positions always condescend to public opinion, don’t they? Otherwise they wouldn’t be controversial.

And, in more death penalty scrivening, Benjamin Soskis argues that the current move for moratoria on execution, as in Illinois, may actually strengthen the death penalty, based as they are not on a fundamental objection to the central principle that a state may take a life but merely concerns about the imperfect application of that principle. The New Republic