The Power to Be Merciful and the Power to Punish

• In Event: Sociology of Law Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Sociology of Law Section Roundtables: Table 5 — Courts, Credibility, and Legal Decision-Making

Abstract

Theorized as operating “alongside punishment” (Horowitz 2024, 1812), current theorizations of mercy have yet to contend with mercy’s deep entanglement with the power to punish itself. Further still, we know little about what mercy actually is, and therefore, how, when acting on the power to be merciful, the state acts on the power to punish. This project seeks to disentangle the relationship between the power to be merciful from the power to punish in order to understand what mercy is, what it is doing, and how the powers co-constitute one another. Through a mixed-methods analysis of one state’s mercy process, relying on an unprecedented body of audio, video, and archival data, this project seeks to deepen our understanding of mercy beyond that of a mechanism of social control which serves as a tool for punishment. Instead, this project argues that the power to be merciful is the antithesis of the power to punish. In “doing mercy,” the state constructs and iterates on the power to punish, as it does the power to be merciful.

Author

• Delaney Jane Mosca, University of California, Irvine