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The Electronic Pillory: Social Time and Hostility Toward Capital Murderers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Scott Phillips  and
Mark Cooney
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Abstract

In early modern Europe, popular hostility toward criminals could be expressed through the use of the pillory (a device in which offenders were restrained and publicly displayed). Modern electronic communications have facilitated the emergence of contemporary versions of the pillory. One such example is prodeathpenalty.com, a Web site created by supporters of capital punishment that permits members to post comments about particular executions. Most such comments are markedly hostile toward the convicted offender. But is the hostility random or patterned? A new theory by Donald Black predicts that hostility will increase with changes in social space, or the movement of social time. Testing Black's theory, we find that the number of online comments hostile to the killer and supportive of the execution increases with the degree to which the murder was a movement of relational, vertical, and cultural time. Moving beyond the electronic pillory, we argue that Black's theory has much to offer to law and society scholars.

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Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 49 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 725 - 759
Copyright
© 2015 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

For providing comments on an earlier draft, we thank Donald Black, Bradley Campbell, Jared Del Rosso, Mike Radelet, the anonymous reviewers, and the editors. We would also like to thank the Nancy Maron Fund for providing generous financial support for the research.

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