Forthcoming: Birte Christ, Imagining the American Death Penalty: The Cultural Work of Popular Visual Representations (OUP, 2025) @oxfordunipress.bsky.social

Forthcoming from Oxford University Press: Birte Christ, Giessen University, Imagining the American Death Penalty: The Cultural Work of Popular Visual Representations (publication date, May 31, 2025). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

Imagining the American Death Penalty traces the US American cultural imaginary of capital punishment through popular visual representations from the 1890s to the twenty-first century. The book focuses on three generic and historical clusters of representations: early film from the 1890s through Intolerance (1916), crime film noir of the 1950s and1960s, and legal TV series from the 1990s through the early 2000s. The book makes two central arguments. First, it demonstrates that an increased concern with the death penalty in popular media does not mean that these texts promote an abolitionist agenda: their cultural work is ambiguous at best. This ambiguity is always contingent upon both the affordances of the particular genre and medium in question and on political-legal discursive context. The book explores both in detail. Early film is enchanted with its own representational possibilities due to the progress of technology and, in analogy, with the progress in execution technique, specifically the electric chair. In film noir, genre conventions and the legal back-and-forth before and after Furman predicate ambiguity. In legal TV series, the genre's ensemble casts and its focus on conversational exchange invite open debate. The second argument is that popular visual representations consistently whitewash the death penalty. The book demonstrates that this is the case because the most common narrative around executions in film and TV is to cast the condemned man as a hero who defies the violence of the state, gains dignity by accepting his fate and faults, and in some ways triumphs over death. The American imaginary, until very recently, did or could not imagine Black men to possess that measure of agency that it attributed to its white heroes.

Jouet on A Lost Chapter in Death Penalty History: Furman v. Georgia, Albert Camus, and the Normative Challenge to Capital Punishment @MugambiJouet @AmJCrimL @LawMcGill

Mugambi Jouet, McGill Faculty of Law, is publishing A Lost Chapter in Death Penalty History: Furman v. Georgia, Albert Camus, and the Normative Challenge to Capital Punishment in the American Journal of Criminal Law. Here is the abstract.

Overlooked historical sources call into question the standard narrative that the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Furman v. Georgia (1972), which temporarily abolished the death penalty, reflected a challenge to its arbitrary, capricious, and discriminatory application. This Article examines materials that scholars have neglected, including the main brief in Aikens v. California, a companion case to Furman that presented the fundamental constitutional claim: the death penalty is inherently cruel and unusual. Aikens was largely forgotten to history after it became moot, leaving Furman as the main case before the Court. The Aikens brief’s humanistic claims and rhetoric are at odds with the widespread idea that Furman was a case about administrative or procedural problems with capital punishment. This is truer of the Furman decision itself than of the way the case was litigated. Depicting any execution as “barbarity,” as an “atavistic horror,” the Aikens brief marshaled an argument that has garnered much less traction in modern America than Europe: the death penalty is an affront to human dignity. Yet the transatlantic divergence in framing abolitionism was not always as pronounced as it came to be in Furman’s aftermath. Since the Enlightenment, American and European abolitionists had long emphasized normative arguments against capital punishment, thereby revealing why they played a central role in Aikens-Furman. Strikingly, the Aikens brief insistently quoted a European figure whose role in this seminal Supreme Court case has received no attention: Albert Camus. “Reflections on the Guillotine,” Camus’s denunciation of the death penalty’s inhumanity, is among the sources prominently featured in the Aikens-Furman briefs. The architect of this strategy was Anthony Amsterdam, a famed litigator. Subsequent generations of American abolitionists have placed less weight on humanistic objections to executions, instead stressing procedural and administrative claims. This shift has obscured how a lost chapter in death penalty history unfolded. These events are key to understanding the evolution of capital punishment, from its resurgence in the late twentieth century to its present decline as the number of executions nears record lows. On Furman’s fiftieth anniversary, the Article offers another window into the past as scholars anticipate a future constitutional challenge to the death penalty in one or two generations.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Meyer on Hearing the Constitutional Infirmity of the Modern American Death Penalty in the Bygone Songs of Ozark Folklore @NSULawCollege

Chance Meyer, Nova Southeastern University, Shepard Board College of Law, is publishing Twas the Devil: Hearing the Constitutional Infirmity of the Modern American Death Penalty in the Bygone Songs of Ozark Folklore in volume 87 of the Mississippi Law Journal (2017). Here is the abstract.

In the midcentury Ozark Highlands, folklorist Mary Celestia Parler collected over 4,500 reel-to-reel recordings of hillfolk singing the songs and spinning the tales of their ancestors. The Ozark Folksong Collection was recently digitized in a preservation effort at the University of Arkansas Libraries, providing new access to the deeply rooted folk knowledge of the region. Murder ballads reveal that murderers were consistently portrayed to generations of Ozarkers as inhuman monsters, purely evil, with an inevitable deservingness of the death penalty uncomplicated by complex behavioral drives or moral vagaries. News reports, commentary, rhetoric, and prosecutorial arguments surrounding twenty-first century executions of capital defendants tried in Ozark counties of Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma reflect that Ozarkers still rely on folkloric attributes to understand murderers. As a result, folk knowledge supplants Eighth Amendment principles that require capital sentencing jurors to view defendants as complexly, multidimensionally human and subject to biopsychosocial influences. Because there are regional folk traditions across the country, the folklore-based constitutional infirmity of the modern American death penalty apparent in the Ozarks is sure to occur beyond the hilltops.

The full text is not available for download.

Of Intellectual Disability and the Death Sentence

From the New York Times: In Moore v. Texas, No. 15-797, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider the question of mental capacity and whether a defendant should be eligible for the death sentence if he or she has an I.Q. that is so low that s/he is essentially unable to function in society. This standard is named after the character of Lennie in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.  

More about Lennie and the "Lennie Standard" below.

Carl Bailey, "He's Dumb as Hell, But He Ain't Crazy."

Julia Barton, Judging Steinbeck's Lennie. Life of the Law.

Dianna Wray, "Texas Uses 'Of Mice and Men Standards' To Execute Mentally Disabled  Man," Houston Press, January 29, 2015.