David Cole teaches at Georgetown University Law Centre. He is the author, most recently, of The Torture Memos: Rationalising the Unthinkable.
Why does the United States alone among Western countries retain the death penalty? Long after all of Europe and much of the rest of the modern world abolished it, recognising that it violates fundamental human rights, the US has more than 3250 men and women on death row.
It’s tempting to chalk this disparity up to American exceptionalism, but that’s more a slogan than an...
Until the detention of ‘enemy combatants’ at Guantánamo Bay, few legal disputes in the United States had provoked such impassioned international criticism as the 1921 conviction and 1927 execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants found guilty of robbing and murdering a factory paymaster and a security guard in broad daylight in South Braintree,...
According to John Cheever, 1948 was ‘the year everybody in the United States was worried about homosexuality’. And nobody was more worried than the federal government, which was...
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