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US murder rates since 1990 have consistently been around double those of India: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/murder-homicide-rate https://ww

• skissane 4y ago
  > Another thing (that might also be true of India) is that the US is a federation of fifty states, each of which have their own laws India is a federation of states too. So is Canada (Canada's provinces are just states by another name), Mexico, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Brazil, Argentina, etc. Many Americans seem to think the US is somehow unique by having states, but it is far from uncommon. Invoking it to explain America's unusual features only makes sense when you don't know that many other countries have similar systems. In both India and Canada criminal law is a federal responsibility, so criminal law is the same across all the states. Indian states and Canadian provinces still have the power to make their own laws in other areas. This means the formal abolition of the death penalty in Canada had to be done at the federal level, and any future such abolition in India would have to be at the federal level too. But in both countries, while the letter of criminal law is federal, state/provincial governments handle the majority of implementation of it, so even with death penalty on the books they still had a lot of lee-way in deciding how much it gets used. Although, in the case of contemporary India, India’s Supreme Court has made clear they will only uphold the death penalty in the rarest of cases, which is a big part of why there are so few executions, meaning that right now state differences in policies/attitudes mean less than they did in the past Whereas Australia, like the US and unlike Canada and India, has separate state and federal criminal laws, which meant (just like the US) some states abolished the death penalty decades before others – Queensland abolished it in 1922, it was abolished federally in 1973, but New South Wales became the last state to abolish it in 1985 (although they'd already abolished it for murder in 1955, so the complete 1985 abolition was only for rare offences such as treason). In 2010, the federal Parliament passed a law which bans any state from reintroducing the death penalty (using the treaty power, since Australia has ratified an international treaty to ban the death penalty)
  • philwelch 4y ago
    > Many Americans seem to think the US is somehow unique by having states, but it is far from uncommon. Invoking it to explain America's unusual features only makes sense when you don't know that many other countries have similar systems. I was aware of this; there's no need to be patronizing. The point I was making was that the American states are as distinct from one another as many countries are, particularly in the application of the death penalty. > In both India and Canada criminal law is a federal responsibility, so criminal law is the same across all the states. So you acknowledge that in the specific context we were discussing, the US system is different from those countries after all.
    • skissane 4y ago
      > I was aware of this; there's no need to be patronizing. I’m sorry you experienced my comment as patronising, that was not my intention. > The point I was making was that the American states are as distinct from one another as many countries are, But heaps of non-American states are as distinctive from each other as many countries are in all sorts of ways (this included)-so what? 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, and the last execution in Queensland was over 50 years earlier. How is that in any way different from the US? You seem to be arguing the US is somehow distinctive in this regard, when it isn’t. And then when I point out it isn’t distinctive, you claim to already know that. I’m not sure what argument you are making then. > So you acknowledge that in the specific context we were discussing, the US system is different from those countries after all. In terms of federal-vs-state distribution of powers in criminal law, Australia and the US are rather similar - not exactly the same, but I can’t see how the differences are relevant here. 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. Even in the case of India having few executions and the US having many, I don’t think this difference in model actually explains it. In India’s case, it is because their federal Supreme Court is semi-abolitionist - it doesn’t want to ban the death penalty completely, but it only wants to allow it occasionally. The exact same situation could occur in the US if there was a US Supreme Court majority with the same attitude. Whereas, if the Indian Supreme Court decided to take the same “hands-off” attitude SCOTUS does, you’d likely see some Indian states with many executions and others with de facto abolition-not hugely dissimilar to the current US situation