The Killing State: Capital Punishment in Law, Politics and Culture
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The Killing State: Capital Punishment in Law, Politics and Culture Austin Sarat (ed.) Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, 263pp. ISBN: 0 1951 4602 6. Contemporary Political Theory (2003) 2, 255–257. doi: 10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300048
The papers in this collection represent an important and wide-ranging crosssection of current debate about the death penalty. Coming from the varied perspectives of moral and political philosophy, legal theory, cultural criticism and what might be called political anthropology, the approaches taken range from mainstream to Nietzschean to deconstructionist. Neither is the collection univocally against the death penalty. These essays would make fruitful reading for anyone interested in the death penalty, state violence or the role of punishment in our societies more generally. This collection appears during a period in which the use of the death penalty in the USA has been markedly revived, and many of the writers here seek to explain and deplore this fact. One theme that recurs through a number of the papers is the apparently increasing willingness of the American Supreme Court to sacrifice due process in order to secure an execution, bringing to an end a process of appeals on dubious legal grounds. In Anthony G. Amsterdam’s words, these decisions ‘forsake fairness, orderly procedure, intelligence and judicial efficiency for no stated reason and no rational purpose’ (148). Such apparently irrational behaviour needs an explanation. A number of the writers find it in the need of the nation-state, under threat from so many angles, to exert its sovereignty in this most absolute way. Regardless of the threat to its sovereignty posed by multinational corporations and the widely perceived problem of its legitimacy, the nation-state still holds the awesome power of life or death over us, its citizens. Thus in his introduction, Austin Sarat argues that in such a state of affairs, the death penalty comes to have a crucial political weight: ‘If the sovereignty of the people is to be genuine, it has to mimic the sovereign power and prerogatives of the monarchical forms it displaced and about whose sovereignty there could be few doubts’ (5). The connection between democracy and violence is a theme taken up in one of the many striking essays in this volume, Anne Norton’s ‘After the Terror: Mortality, Equality, Fraternity’. Quoting Nietzsche to the effect that violence does not merely destroy but establishes, she looks at the role of violence in the establishment of democratic regimes, both in the English and French revolutions (focusing particularly on the use of the death penalty) and in the Algerian war of liberation. Drawing on Fanon, she has some interesting things
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to say about the seemingly necessary but unpalatable fact that those engaged in a war of liberation be prepared to do things that they themselves take to be awful and which scar their lives. Julie M. Taylor explores another aspect of the ‘killing state’ F though one in which repression is a leftover from a dictato
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