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Speaking of Death: Narratives of Violence in Capital Trials

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Austin Sarat
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Abstract

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How are violence and pain put into legal discourse? How does law distinguish its violence—capital punishment—from other kinds of violence? Do the strategies used to differentiate legal and extralegal violence alleviate anxiety about law and the uses to which law's violence is put? This article addresses these questions through an analysis of a capital trial in which an African-American man is being retried for the murder of a young white woman. It examines the social and cultural resources used to speak about violence and to differentiate legal and extralegal violence, and it suggests that the juxtaposition of narratives about violence in capital trials arouses rather than alleviates anxiety.

Type
Symposium: Research on the Death Penalty
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , 1993 , pp. 19 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

I am grateful for the helpful comments of Robert Burt, Marianne Constable, Lawrence Douglas, Tom Dumm, Joel Handler, and Stephanie Sandler.

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