Primitive symbolic consciousness and the death penalty in American culture
2001; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 83; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2163-6214
Autores Tópico(s)Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis
ResumoThe green van speeded down the dirt road toward us. It looked a little like an truck such as you might see in your neighborhood. There were about sixty of us in the adjacent field, and we crowded up against the fence that kept us from the roadway. As the ice cream truck advanced, I saw that it was trailed by two police cruisers, racing along as escort sentries. We watched them pass us, the silent ones among us holding candles and standing vigil by the fence. We watched their tail lights disappear into the blackness of the rural night. Another green ice cream truck, carrying the body of a man killed only moments before by the state of Virginia in my name. The example of the gallows is that a man's life ceases to be sacred when it is thought useful to kill him. Apparently it is becoming ever more useful; the example is being copied; the contagion is spreading everywhere. And together with it, the disorder of nihilism.1 EXECUTION BY THE STATE: THE CURRENT SITUATION Indeed, the contagion is spreading across this country. In the state where I live, the number of executions per year has risen steadily since the Supreme Court allowed the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1977, only superseded by Texas in total overall numbers of persons legally put to death. In 1998, the SOOth person was executed in this country since the 1977 reinstatement, and there has occurred a sharp slope upward in the rate of killing over the years, as well. This sharp slope upward is reflected in national statistics reported over the last twenty years, with one execution carried out in 1977, 25 in 1987, 74 in 1997, and 98 persons put to death by the state in 1998.2 This increased rate of executions is explained in part because of the backlog of cases on death row whose appeals have finally run their course. But there also appears to be an increasingly conservative political mentality in this land that supports and encourages elected officials in a pro-death stance. In fact, it has been argued that politicians opposing the death penalty in their jurisdictions run the risk of countering strong public sentiment in support of capital punishment, thus jeopardizing their political careers. But along with this increased execution rate supported by political and social forces, media attention has recently focused on spectacular cases of death row release for prisoners who have been found innocent, through sometimes serendipitous means. In 1998, there was also great media activity surrounding the first woman executed in this country in recent memory by the state of Texas, as well as a flurry of news reports about an emotional appeal for clemency by the visiting Pope for a prisoner scheduled to be executed the next day. Sister Helen Prejean's book, Dead Man Walking,3 and the subsequent movie with Sean Penn, have dramatized for the consuming public the inside workings of the death penalty system, and that work has been followed by other non-fiction accounts 4 displaying major flaws in the system (in short, inadequate defense for the poor, too little, too late). In addition, wrenching eyewitness accounts of executions written by those close to the person killed or, in one case, by the death penalty judge himself, have appeared in the last couple of years.5 One of these eyewitnesses concludes in this fashion: For 48 hours after the execution I felt an extreme compulsion to shower and shower and shower again. Eventually I realized that I felt filthy because I had observed an obscenity. Never in my life have I been so aware of the reality of evil as I was in that observation booth, watching the deliberate, methodical and antiseptic killing of Samuel McDonald, a killing done by the state of Missouri in the name of its citizens. For a long time I have known, intellectually, that capital punishment is wrong. Now I feel it-it's visceral.6 And yet, despite such accounts, the execution process, the premeditated taking of a human life by the state, continues unabated. …
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