Executing Freedom : The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States - Daniel LaChance

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Executing Freedom

The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States

By: Daniel LaChance

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Paperback | 9 February 2018 | Edition Number 1

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Paperback
272 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.63 x 15.8 x 1.5

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$82.75

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In the mid-1990s, as public trust in big government was near an all-time low, 80% of Americans told Gallup that they supported the death penalty. Why did people who didn’t trust government to regulate the economy or provide daily services nonetheless believe that it should have the power to put its citizens to death?

That question is at the heart of Executing Freedom, a powerful, wide-ranging examination of the place of the death penalty in American culture and how it has changed over the years. Drawing on an array of sources, including congressional hearings and campaign speeches, true crime classics like In Cold Blood, and films like Dead Man Walking, Daniel LaChance shows how attitudes toward the death penalty have reflected broader shifts in Americans’ thinking about the relationship between the individual and the state. Emerging from the height of 1970s disillusion, the simplicity and moral power of the death penalty became a potent symbol for many Americans of what government could do—and LaChance argues, fascinatingly, that it’s the very failure of capital punishment to live up to that mythology that could prove its eventual undoing in the United States.

Industry Reviews

"Executing Freedom is a truly extraordinary book. It offers a remarkable reading of the resonance of America's death penalty and some of the deepest strains in our culture, in particular beliefs about negative freedom. In addition, LaChance offers important lessons for abolitionists, warning that the problems in the death penalty system are not simply its assault on human dignity or its arbitrary and flawed administration, but rather its failure to generate the meaning that modern citizens crave. From start to finish, this book provides a sophisticated and persuasive analysis of the cultural life of capital punishment."--Austin Sarat "author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty "

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