The latest edition of The American Prospect features a series of articles by prominent writers and human rights leaders regarding the effect of the international movement for human rights on the U.S. Two of the articles highlight U.S. death penalty policies. Yale Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh points out the conflict between the U.S.’s efforts to support international human rights and our domestic practices such as the use of the juvenile death penalty. “In my view, by far the most dangerous and destructive form of American exceptionalism is the assertation of double standards. For by embracing double standards, the United States invariably ends up not on the higher rung but on the lower rung with horrid bedfellows - for example, such countries as Iran, Nigeria, and Saudia Arabia, the only other nations that have not in practice either abolished or declared a moratorium on the imposition of the death penalty on juvenile offenders.”

A second article, Criminal Justice and the Erosion of Rights by human rights scholar Deborah Pearlstein, examines the impact of legislation such as the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and The PATRIOT Act on capital cases. Pearlstein notes, “While human-rights observers have rightly focused on terrorism-related developments in the U.S. criminal justice system, the trend toward limited procedural protections for defendants and a shrinking judicial role well predates the September 11 attacks. Indeed, security has been a central justification for rights-limiting changes in the criminal-justice system for decades.” Among the other authors in the series are Anthony Lewis, John Shattuck, Gay McDougall, Cass Sunstein, Gara LaMarche, and Mary Robinson. (The American Prospect, October 2004) See International Death Penalty, Juvenile Death Penalty, and Federal Death Penalty.