> You seem to be arguing the US is somehow distinctive in this regard, when it isn’t.
I’m not arguing that at all. If you look closely I actually guessed that India was likely federalized as well.
My point was more that it’s not useful either way to look at this as a US issue when in reality, you have some states like Texas with very high rates of execution and others like Washington with none at all. My point is about how you’re framing the issue in the first place, in other words.
> I mean, when the Australian state of Victoria carried out Australia’s last execution in 1967, the death penalty had already been abolished in Queensland for over 40 years
I would say that Australian national death penalty statistics from the 1950’s aren’t particularly meaningful either.
> We can speak of two different criminal law models in a federation - the Canada/India model and the US/Australia model. In each case, we have one country with that model retaining the death penalty and one abolishing it, suggesting to me that the difference between these models has little to do with the retention or abolition of the death penalty.
> My point was more that it’s not useful either way to look at this as a US issue when in reality, you have some states like Texas with very high rates of execution and others like Washington with none at all. My point is about how you’re framing the issue in the first place, in other words
But it absolutely does make sense to look at it as a US issue. The US is one country with a great deal of shared national culture - yes, there are cultural differences between different parts of the US, but they are rather small by global standards. Every US state has English as its primary language - that’s a very different situation from Canada (with Quebec and French), to say nothing of India, in which the majority of states have their own language. The US has a single two-party system nationwide, unlike many other countries where different parts of the country have completely different party systems (e.g Canada, India, the UK, Spain). State-based politics in the US is highly influenced by national politics and actually far less distinctive than in many other countries. Indian state-level politics is far more distinctive and independent from Indian national politics than US-state level politics is
And why should people outside the US care about the difference between different US states, any more than people in the US care about different Indian states, or Mexican states, or Swiss cantons? To focus on a country as a whole is the standard framing everyone uses to compare different countries, and even Americans adopt that framing when it comes to countries other than the US. There is no reason to treat the US specially here
I’m not arguing that at all. If you look closely I actually guessed that India was likely federalized as well.
My point was more that it’s not useful either way to look at this as a US issue when in reality, you have some states like Texas with very high rates of execution and others like Washington with none at all. My point is about how you’re framing the issue in the first place, in other words.
> I mean, when the Australian state of Victoria carried out Australia’s last execution in 1967, the death penalty had already been abolished in Queensland for over 40 years
I would say that Australian national death penalty statistics from the 1950’s aren’t particularly meaningful either.
> We can speak of two different criminal law models in a federation - the Canada/India model and the US/Australia model. In each case, we have one country with that model retaining the death penalty and one abolishing it, suggesting to me that the difference between these models has little to do with the retention or abolition of the death penalty.
That is a mile beside any point I was making.