Why are Americans so gung-ho on capital punishment?

It’s not a big topic of debate these days, but American policy on the death penalty is a strange phenomenon:

Globally, there is a strong correlation between capital punishment and totalitarianism. Indeed, the United States is one of the last Western democracies that still carries out executions.

For example, as of this writing, only 3 (out of 50) nations in Europe retain the death penalty. One, Russia, has a moratorium on further executions. One, Latvia, has abolished capital punishment except during war time. Only one — Belarus — continues to practice capital punishment in 2011. And Belarus is a petty thugocracy, not a liberal democracy.

In contrast, the United States annually ranks among the world’s leaders in executions. 2010 was no exception. Last year, America ranked fifth globally in executions, behind China, Iran, North Korea, and Yemen, and ahead of Libya and Syria. With the sole exception of Taiwan, none of our industrial democracy peers are on the list. Such, apparently, is the company we keep.

This is puzzling to me. Generally, value systems come in packages; we’re more like Western Europe than Iran and Libya in almost any sociological sense. Our views on same-sex marriage, the role of women in society, and abortion track pretty closely. So why is there this one holdout? Stranger still, it doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. Sixty-four percent say they favor the death penalty as an option for murder, according to polling from last October, and half say it is not used enough. There must be some societal x-factor that Americans have and everyone else does not.