Abstract
Just as capital punishment seemed to be dying out in the United States after the Second World War, it re-emerged in the late 1970s as a wildly popular protest of both liberal big government and the social problems its experts had failed to solve. For the next three decades, historian Daniel LaChance argues in Executing Freedom, middle-class whites participated in a cultural revival of retributive punishment hopelessly enmeshed in the same big government bureaucracy they wanted to escape.
How is it, LaChance asks, that white Americans so distrustful of the government became such staunch supporters of the killing state? Executing Freedom sets about answering this puzzle by exploring the cultural life of capital punishment in film, television, and literature, as well as through real-life cases of the death penalty and those who pursue it.
The book begins at a moment when middle-class white Americans were growing disenchanted with the promises of postwar liberalism. Increasingly, whites saw the federal government as driven by the whims of liberal elites who wished to engineer society instead of represent traditional (i.e. white) work-a-day interests.
Chapter 1 traces the cultural revival of the death penalty in the 1950s through the 1970s. Middle-class whites increasingly distrusted large bureaucracies and their professional staff, particularly psychiatrists, to cope with violent criminals. For answers to this sudden shift, LaChance turns to films like the Dirty Harry series, and Death Wish, and various novels which portrayed white male psychopathy—itself symptomatic of moral decadence of modern culture—and how this fear was managed by creating a mythical subject of the moral vigilante. The modern vigilante was just one expression of white middle-class USA’s desire to “return to” the order of a simpler social and racial hierarchy exemplified in western films and their modern iterations. Another expression was the rebirth of the death penalty in “people’s collective imagination” (p. 50).
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 explore how white anxiety over the concept of freedom fueled the rise of retributive punishment as a means to affirm negative liberty through the concept of individual responsibility for crime, and various attempts to generate the meaning of a resurgent death penalty. Chapter 2 traces how civil libertarians inadvertently participated in the ratcheting up of the death penalty by advocating for transparency in sentencing. LaChance examines Furman v. Georgia and Gregg v. Georgia’s role in whitewashing capital punishment as a mechanism to inflict biased sentences that disproportionately applied to Black citizens by creating a semblance of guided discretion. Such civil libertarian efforts resulted in a leveling-up of punishment in a punitive criminal justice climate in which thousands of citizens would be placed on death row in the coming decades. In Chapter 3, LaChance examines how the state of Texas struggled to maintain executions’ symbolic legitimacy as a retributive moral reckoning as they became increasingly technocratic affairs resembling a medical procedure. Chapter 4 offers a critical analysis of Hollywood’s cultural campaign to reimagine the death penalty’s racist past by portraying death inmates as predominantly white, while execution scenes themselves were rehabilitated as personal crises of moral redemption. Together, these chapters show the multiplicity of meanings assigned to the death penalty by a variety of subjects, all of which lead the reader to suspect that capital punishment is little more than an empty spectacle.
Chapter 5 revisits the concept of the mythical vigilante in real life. LaChance recounts the public personas of two district attorneys, one in Texas and the other in Oklahoma, whose tenures spanned 1980–2001, and who he argues represent a broader conservative fantasy of white masculinity overcoming a pluralist, bureaucratic criminal justice system. Chapter 6 follows by tracing how the Victim’s Rights Movement and social conservatives came together in embrace of the death penalty, and how popular culture has attempted to reconcile the moral vigilante with family values. LaChance shows readers how the Victim’s Rights Movement championed the reading of victim impact statements during sentencing trials, upheld in Payne v. Tennessee. The Payne decision was also a major victory for family values conservatives because it represented broader trends in how the family, not the public or individuals, was portrayed as the primary social unit in criminal justice proceedings. Chapter 6 concludes with an excursus of the television show Dexter as a cultural medium through which white American fantasies about retributive justice, vigilantism, and family values discourse came together. These competing social fantasies in the US cultural imagination are, he argues, ultimately incompatible.
The book ends with a discussion of the unforeseen demise of capital punishment in the last decade. LaChance cautions death penalty abolitionists against pursuing their policy goals through a campaign of inmate humanization. Instead, LaChance points to the bureaucratic haziness and political emptiness of the death penalty as more likely avenues through which white USA will become disenchanted with executions.
Executing Freedom is fiercely provocative. It invites readers to consider capital punishment as popular culture performance of myth-making that implicates not only capital punishment, but also broader tenets of cultural conservatism in the long US tradition of constructing fraudulent histories of nostalgia that suppress their violent origins. By linking together popular culture portrayals of the death penalty in film and television with its real-life proponents and rationales, LaChance challenges readers to consider how anxious meaning-making surrounding capital punishment ultimately exposes its emptiness as a political and cultural symbol, much like the culture rallied around it. Far from enacting, as Hobbes argued, the ground of state sovereignty, LaChance renders the modern death penalty as a morbid form of entertainment media devoid of genuine political meaning, either as a form of moral reckoning with the state, or as a kind of Foucauldian “neutralization” of criminal threat.
That said, while it is clear that LaChance appreciates the role of racism in changing attitudes on capital punishment, the book’s outsized attention to racially endogenous causes of white support for retributive justice inadvertently plays into broader cultural attempts to whitewash the racist precipitants of modern death penalty. In “Inside your daddy’s house” especially, LaChance centers on the emergence of psychopathy and nihilism in white Cold War culture as a primary cause of the death penalty’s revival as a symbol of moral integrity. In his subsequent discussion of rising violent crime in the 1960s and 1970s (p. 46ff.) he makes almost no mention of how criminal suspects and prison populations from the real-life urban centers depicted in Dirty Harry and Death Wish were becoming more Black and brown. LaChance does intermittently acknowledge (e.g. Chapters 2 and 4) the role of white supremacist ideology in capital punishment practice and cultural symbology. However, this strain of his analysis largely remains peripheral and distinct from his exploration of the book’s core themes of vigilantism, negative liberty, and personal responsibility, all of which are arguably—like whiteness itself—fundamentally dependent on cultural, political, and economic exclusion of Blacks and cultural minorities. Although no project can do everything, a fuller treatment of white portrayals of Black and brown street crime in visual and print media would have effectively balanced LaChance’s emphasis on white psychopathic killers.
This shortcoming, however, is more product of Executing Freedom’s ambitious scope rather than of the author’s critical awareness. In all, Executing Freedom is a must-read for socio-legal studies and punishment scholars who want to know more about how the phenomenon of capital punishment took on a life of its own in the modern US cultural imagination.