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The Execution Spectacle and State Legitimacy: The Changing Nature of the American Execution Audience, 1833–1937

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Annulla Linders
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Abstract

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This paper examines the role of the audience in the process that transformed executions from public spectacles to hidden rituals, and makes visible the ambiguities and uncertainties that accompanied the transportation of capital punishment from its monarchical origins to a modern democratic setting. From this vantage point, the evolving responses to concerns associated with the execution audience share many characteristics with efforts to control other problematic audiences. And yet, the particular forms that audience manipulation in the context of executions took cannot be fully understood without considering the occasion that brought the audience into being. Viewed as a mirror held up to the execution, the audience, whether conceptualized as a rowdy crowd or a solemn group of witnesses, emerges as a constitutive element of the execution and, in this sense, carries the potential to grant, or deny, legitimacy to the event and, by extension, capital punishment itself.

Type
Papers of General Interest
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , 2002 , pp. 607 - 655
Copyright
Copyright © 2002 Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, 1998. A grant from the C. P. Taft Memorial Fund, University of Cincinnati, facilitated the collection of data. The paper has benefited greatly from the review process, and I remain indebted to several anonymous reviewers and the editor, Joseph Sanders. I also wish to thank Michael Benson, Cynthia Bogard, Steve Carlton-Ford, Francis Cullen, Paula Dubeck, Laura Jenkins, Mona Siegel, Rhys Williams, and participants in the Friday afternoon Colloquium Series, Department of Sociology, University of Cincinnati, for useful comments.

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