Since the mid-1980s, almost every Western country has moved to abolish the death penalty. The United States is the exception. This thesis argues that a tradition of popular justice conflicts with the legal tradition of due process.

He shows that the great majority of executions in recent decades have occurred in precisely those Southern states where lynchings were most common a hundred years ago. It is this legacy, Zimring suggests, that constitutes both the distinctive appeal of the death penalty in the United States and one of the most compelling reasons for abolishing it. Impeccably researched and engagingly written, Contradictions in American Capital Punishment casts a clear new light on America's long and troubled embrace of the death penalty.