Bearing Witness: Victims’ Relatives and Challenges to the Execution Narrative

• In Event: 365 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 10. Narrating the Self; Embodying Culture

Abstract

Starting in the 1990s, state after state revised their statutes to include victims’ relatives in the permitted audience of executions. In this paper I pose two interrelated questions on this development. How can we account for this recent transformation of the execution and its audience and what are the consequences of this change for understanding of executions specifically, and capital punishment more generally? To anticipate the discussion below, I argue that the opening up of the witness box to the murder victim’s family has turned the execution into a somewhat different kind of event than it was – it has come to re-personalize executions and re-infuse them with interestedness and passion. Because these new elements of executions in many ways are contrary to current understandings of the overall development of capital punishment in the direction of rationality, efficiency, and de-humanization, they also require some theoretical elaboration. Here I suggest, first, that dominant theories have under-estimated the persistence and endurance of passionate elements in executions and, second, that theories, in order to capture the ways in which the entire institution of capital punishment has changed, for the most part has neglected elements of ambiguity, dynamism and uncertainty that continue to characterize individual execution events.

Author

• Annulla Linders, University of Cincinnati