Dancing with the Jury: A Field Theory of Capital Sentencing

• In Event: 1240 - Law and Culture

Abstract

This paper answers the question: what is American capital sentencing, theoretically speaking? Based on data from the first multi-state ethnography of capital trials, I detail four areas of capital legal practice - the recruitment of punitive jurors, framing the defendant’s childhood, positioning him as a future danger, and highlighting victims’ suffering – to conceptualize capital sentencing as a performative field, leveraging Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. This is the first theoretical model of modern capital sentencing discrete from the larger capital punishment apparatus. In the US, modern death sentences have been described as being reserved for the “worst of the worst” criminals on the one hand, or the most disenfranchised on the other. As an alternative, my model shows that capital sentences are determined by actors’ orientations toward the structures of the legal field.

Author

• Sarah Beth Kaufman, Trinity University