The ritual of capital punishment.

Canada officially abolished capital punishment in 1976. For the last few years, however, our federal government has been adopting increasingly harsher penal policies that resemble American law-and-order politics. As punishments increase in severity, there is pressure to add harsher penalties at the 'top' of the scale, that is, for heinous killing. Members of the federal government are almost exclusively pro-death penalty, so it seems the possibility for reinstatement is real. If the death penalty were proposed it would very likely follow on the heels of a shocking crime, and the discourse surrounding the debate will be one that exploits the emotionality of crime and punishment. In this vein, state killing will present not as a rational response to rule violation but as a necessary ritual to combat a metaphysical form of evil. The purpose of this paper is to examine the ritualistic aspects of state killing as practised in the US today, with a view to deepening our understanding of the punishment's popular appeal so that we can more effectively resist reinstitution or, where capital punishment exists, fight for its abolition. The paper focuses on three aspects of death penalty procedure - the detailed reporting of the offender's final countdown and last meal, and the presence of clergy - to illustrate the connections between concrete practices of state killing and existing transcendental fixtures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]