Conceptualizing Capital Sentencing: Findings from Ethnography.

Social scientists conceptual contemporary capital punishment as primary in organizing state/citizen relations, expressing the moral outrage of a community, and re-inscribing race and class distinctions. Drawing on observations of death penalty trials across the country, I show that these do not adequately explain how capital sentencing works in practice. Instead capital sentencing is the adversarial practice of persuading a lay audience that a given offender is worth keeping alive or deserves to die. It differs from other criminal sentencing venues not only its potential outcome, but in the content of the proceedings. The nexus of social relations, rules, norms, and actions make it a unique site in which human worth is built, performed, and contested. To understand capital sentencing then, we need a different comparative paradigm. Here capital sentencing is taken outside its usual setting and framed along side other events dealing with life, death, and human worth: euthenasia, abortion, tort claims, and military engagement. We can then ask of capital sentencing: what is the value of a human life in this setting? What acts are contested as worthy? What types of authority and expertise define human worth? Are there categories of worthiness that are commonly relied upon by defense and prosecution? How is this concept of worth different from other settings? Implications of the comparisons are discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]