Murder Stories: Ideological Narratives in Capital PunishmentMurder Stories engages with the current theoretical debate in death penalty research on the role of cultural commitments to ‘American’ ideologies in the retention of capital punishment. The central aim of the study is to illuminate the elusive yet powerful role of ideology in legal discourses. Through analyzing the content and processes of death penalty narratives, this research illuminates the covert life of ‘the American Creed,’ (a nexus of ideologies—liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez faire—said to be unique to the United States) in the law. Murder Stories draws on the entire record of California death sentence resulting trials from three large and diverse California counties for the years 1996 – 2004, as well as interviews with 26 capital caseworkers (attorneys, judges, and investigators) from the same counties. Employing the theoretical framework proposed by Ewick and Silbey (1995) to study hegemonic and subversive narratives, and also the ethnographic approach advocated by Amsterdam and Hertz (1992) to study the producers and processes of constructing legal narratives, this book traces the ideological content carried within the stories told by everyday practitioners of capital punishment by investigating the content, process, and ideological implications of these narratives. The central theoretical finding is that the narratives constructed by both prosecutors and defenders tend to instantiate rather than subvert the ideological tenets of the American Creed. |
Contents
1 | |
Chapter 02 The American Creed and American Capital Punishment | 27 |
Chapter 03 Death Especially Deregulated | 59 |
Chapter 04 The American Creed in Prosecutor and Defender Narratives | 85 |
Chapter 05 Forgetting the Future | 133 |
Chapter 06 Facts and Furies | 157 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
abolition aggravating American Creed American Exceptionalism analyzed argued argument California capital defendants capital punishment capital trials cause lawyers chapter character child chose client committed complex conceptualization context County court crime cultural data set death penalty narratives death sentence defendant narratives defendant's delineated described diminished autonomy discourses discussed drugs dystopia egalitarianism empirical evidence Ewick and Silbey example execution explicitly facts Fleury-Steiner Garland guided discretion guilt phase hegemony Hispanic human ideologies individualism individualistic inherently interviews Jamie Jamie's John jurors jury jury instructions killing law’s LWOP Martinez mens rea mental illness methamphetamine murder narratologists notion particular penalty phase person political potential prison prosecution narrative prosecutor question race racial racism rational retribution rhetorical Sarat social history society sociolegal sociopath subversive stories themes theory tion transcripts Trial 13 trial defenders U.S. retention United victims and defendants vigilante vigilante values violence White Female Adult White Male Whitman Zimring Zimring’s