> 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.
> 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
> 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 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.