Pod Academy

In this podcast, David Garland, Professor of Sociology, Law at New York University and author of Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition talks to Benjamin Concannon Smith, co-host of the American Studies channel of the New Books Network. They explore.... - Why is it that the United States continues to enforce the death penalty when the rest of the Western world abolished its use a little over three decades ago? - Many US states were in the vanguard of the 20th century abolition movement - what changed? - Why does a country so concerned to contain the power of the state, nevertheless allow the state to take the lives of its citizens. - Why are the majority of death sentences (which are always discretionary, never mandatory) meted out to black men convicted of killing white people - so that the death penalty is widely seen as 'legal lynching' among African Americans and Latinos. - How come only 'Death Qualified Jurors', those who approve of the death penalty, get to sit on juri