The Bitter Fruit of American Justice: International and Domestic Resistance to the Death Penalty

tence revoked, if more than three weeks have lapsed since the date of sentencing.7 These are strange fruits indeed, which the international community contemplates with astonishment: The United States is very much the great enigma in the death penalty debate, viewed from an international perspective. Its stubborn attachment to capital punishment puzzles Europeans, who see abolition as a logical outgrowth of democratic development and who are mystified about why a country so similar to themselves in so many ways can behave so di=erently.8 Americans are by and large blissfully unaware of the United States’ “growing status as an international pariah” because of its commitment to state execution.9 Such a status conflicts strongly with the preferred national selfconception. In 1997, Jesse Helms, then chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, described U.N. Special Rapporteur Bacre Waly Ndiaye’s visit to the United States to conduct a two-week death penalty fact-finding mission as “an absurd U.N. charade.” He complained, in a letter to the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations, William Richardson, “Bill, is this man confusing the United States with some other country or is this an intentional insult to the United States and to our nation’s legal system?”10 Americans are also, for the most part, unaware of the empirical facts about the death penalty. A resolution adopted by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in 2000,11 addressed such ignorance, urging states retaining the death penalty “to make available to the public information with regard to the imposition of the death penalty”12 as well as to establish a moratorium on executions “with a view to completely abolishing the death penalty.”13 It also rea<rmed its ongoing conviction that “abolition of the death penalty contributes to the enhancement of human dignity and to the progressive development of human rights.”14 The United States was not among the sixty-three signatories. It was, however, singled out quite recently by the U.N. Human Rights Committee for failing to fully acknowledge “studies according to which the death penalty may be imposed disproportionately on ethnic minorities as well as on low-income groups.” The committee urged the United States to place a moratorium on executions, citing the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the United States has both signed and ratified.15 This lack of awareness of the basic facts about state execution domestically, and this insularity with respect to human rights standards internationally, must change. When they do change, will it make a di=erence? There is some reason to think it will. We have mentioned empirical studies, where such facts have lessened support for the death penalty all along the scale. There has been 176 the bitter fruit of american justice