Notes for Talk preceding a Screening of Guilty at the Palace Barracks Cinema on (original) (raw)

Darkness to Light: Procedural Injustice as Crisis for Capital Punishment Legitimacy

As opposed to the years preceding Furman when executions were conducted in relative obscurity, more recent calls for transparency in death penalty administration threaten to expose procedural injustices that facilitate the creation of multiple meanings of the ultimate sanction, a crisis that damages the moral order that contemporary penology and capital jurisprudence depend on. A selection of case studies and death chamber narratives support the thesis that procedural injustice ties to a coalescence of pity and terror, a morass that renders offenders tragic in the public's mind rather than recipient of just punishment. The incorporation of death chamber narratives supports calls by Garland, Sampson, Maruna, and others regarding the use of descriptive ethnography and discourse analysis as key components of criminological explanation.

Citizenship and punishment: Situating death penalty jury sentencing

Although capital punishment in the United States is subject to much social scientific scrutiny, there has been little ethnographic study of death penalty trials. This is not only an empirical lacuna, but also a theoretically and politically important one: by failing to take capital trials as primary objects of inquiry, the practices of lawyers, witnesses, judges, and others are viewed as products of, rather than implicated in, the institution of criminal justice. Based on an ethnography of fifteen death penalty sentencing trials across the United States during 2007, 2008, and 2009, this article seeks to understand the role of juries in capital trials. While judges customarily make sentencing decisions in American criminal cases, capital cases require jury sentencing. Key to understanding this unusual requirement is the recruitment of potential jurors into a role I term punitive citizenship. Through the process of choosing ‘death qualified’ jurors for trial, capital jurors are asked to call upon their own moral positions in conjunction with their responsibility to the collective to decide on appropriate punishments for defendants who are singled out for capital prosecution by the state. This ensures that capital jurors take personal responsibility for the punishment decision. The article argues that this process blurs the lines between state and citizen action, solidifies the types of homicides that are designated worthy of capital punishment, and allows the state to neutralize some of the historic problems with state-sponsored death sentences.