He writes against the death penalty all the time–sometimes persuasively so; more often not. Today, he writes, “[T]he most awesome and, historically, most worrisome power of government is not to take property but to take life. In Europe in the past century, this was done on such a vast scale that today no European country retains the death penalty.” Cohen loves making this point, and this way of putting it is relatively restrained for him.

But at the very least, there’s more to the story. If Cohen had read Charles Lane’s article a few weeks ago–it wasn’t in an obscure newspaper–he might have learned that the most vocally anti-execution country in Europe, Germany, abolished the death penalty in large part because people who sympathized with Nazi war criminals did not want them hanged.