An all-American death

Walk five or six small paces forward; turn 90 degrees and take three or four more dainty steps. Turn again and repeat the process. You have now made a complete tour of a standard-size cell on Florida's Death Row where, were you an average inmate, you would spend 11.3 years awaiting execution. I mentioned this fact to a wise and wry friend of mine. She sighed and said: "Well, I hope they like reading".

Many of them probably don't. Of the dozen prisoners currently scheduled for lethal injection in Texas, two-thirds have an educational age of 10 years or below. Though the Supreme Court has ruled that the Eighth Amendment (which forbids "cruel and unusual punishment") prohibits killing the insane, the Court has also found that mental retardation raises no bar to execution. It was no doubt his respect for the Constitution which impelled William Jefferson Clinton to take time out from his 1992 presidential campaign to return to Arkansas to sign the gubernatorial death-warrant of Ricky Rector, "a braindamaged inmate so oblivious to his fate that he planned to save the dessert from his last meal to eat after his execution".

On the Texas Department of Justice's website (www.tdcj.state. tx.us/stat/finalmeals.htm), you can peruse the menus requested by the condemned, many of whom are evidently keen at least to expire as All-Americans, stipulating as they do vast quantities of slaughtered cattle and apple pie - the most touching and least sanguinary begins "eight soft fried eggs (wants yellow runny)".

Florida has a sterner sense of fiscal priority: last suppers must not cost more than $20. The price of the three-drug cocktail which dispatches evil-doers, on the other hand, is $86.08. Though I suppose children come cheaper, requiring smaller doses. The USA is one of only seven countries which sentence-people to death for crimes committed before their eighteenth birthday, an axis of like-minded regimes which includes Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Iran. As befits its standing as Top Nation, the USA heads this list with a tally of 160 such sentences in the past three decades.

On New Year's Day 2002, there were 3,711 residents of Death Row. As Stuart Banner's sombre book makes plain, the most astonishing thing about this hangman's bonanza is that the Supreme Court had ruled the death penalty itself unconstitutional in 1972; between 1968 and 1977 there were no executions. In New Hampshire, they stored vegetables in the death-chamber; the Arkansas electric chair was "unplugged and used for giving inmates haircuts".

The tide of abolitionist feeling which had been swelling from the late 18th century suddenly ebbed. This must have come as a shock to the faith of those who, like the Justices of the Supreme Court in 1958, believed that an ever more delicate sense of what constitutes "cruel and unnatural punishment" is an integral part of "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society". Those of us who find it easier to believe in God than in progress - the evidence for the existence of either is thin - return to our prayers with a pardonable smirk.

Throughout The Death Penalty: An American History, Banner preserves an even-tempered scepticism about the passionate but fluctuant certainties this issue provokes. His evidence shows that leaps of dogmatic faith are as acrobatically performed by secularists as by the pious. Clarence Darrow (a transatlantic Ludovic Kennedy) harangued a jury in a 1925 murder trial: "There isn't a scientist on earth who doesn't believe and say that man is a product of heredity and environment alone." Advocates are such fibbers, but Darrow's reasoning is even more questionable than his veracity. He was against the death penalty, but once you regard individuals as products of society, it is hard to see why society shouldn't dispose of items of its own manufacture as it sees fit.

This was better understood by an anonymous writer a century earlier who congratulated Massachusetts for sweeping from the face of that state "the refuse and dregs of society, thrown off in the effervescence of that morbid mass which lies at the bottom of old and dense communities and cleaves like leprosy to decaying governments". It is when we conceive properly of individuals as processes that we begin to have qualms about terminating them and to doubt what Victor Hugo called "this exorbitant right which society arrogates to itself, the right of taking away something which it never gave".