Editor's note: this chapter contains uncensored uses of a racial slur in quotations

"What profit him to bleed? Shall the dust praise him? Shall the worms declare his truth?" [1]

Arthur Miller, The Crucible (1953)

In colonial New England, public executions were dramas of sin and redemption played out in front of attentive crowds. On hanging day, clergy delivered moralizing sermons to the assembled community, the crowd sang hymns, and the condemned, following an unofficial script, spoke of her hope for God’s grace. [2] The early American murderer, facing execution, was not a monster or a democratic political subject but an embodiment of the sinful humanity that resided within everyone. [3] Clergy often recounted the penitent spiritual journey the condemned had undertaken since their conviction for the capital crime, expressing hope that God’s grace had saved them from hell. [4] Indeed, until at least the nineteenth century, defenders of capital punishment would argue that a death sentence was more likely to rehabilitate a person than was a penitentiary. [5]

In our comparatively secular age, this understanding of a death sentence as a soul saver seems strange. That may explain why, as Supreme Court justices sorted through the various historical rationales for capital punishment in their 1972 Furman ruling, none mentioned it. Justice Warren Burger, for instance, made no mention of the religious relation between retribution and redemption in upholding the constitutionality of the sanction. Instead, he wrote of the “severe emotional stress” of awaiting an execution. He saw nothing beneficial about the mental anguish the condemned experienced; that pain was, he admitted, “cruel in the sense that all suffering is thought cruel.” [6]

When rehabilitation did appear in the Furman opinions, it was part of liberal justices’ arguments against the death penalty. Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan, the two justices who found death a cruel and unusual punishment, saw cruelty in the way death, by ending a person’s existence forever, foreclosed on the possibility of their capacity to flourish in the future. Arguing that the death penalty was an affront to human dignity, Justice Brennan described an execution as irrevocable exile from the human race:

Although death, like expatriation, destroys the individual’s “political existence” and his “status in organized society,” it does more, for, unlike expatriation, death also destroys “his very existence.” There is, too, at least the possibility that the expatriate will in the future regain “the right to have rights.” Death forecloses even that possibility. Death is a truly awesome punishment. The calculated killing of a human being by the State involves, by its very nature, a denial of the executed person’s humanity. [7]

In his own concurring opinion, Justice Marshall expressed this idea much more succinctly: “Death is irrevocable; life imprisonment is not. Death, of course, makes rehabilitation impossible; life imprisonment does not.” [8] In many ways Marshall and Brennan articulated the commonsense, secular assumption of mainstream criminology in the 1950s and 1960s: capital punishment ended lives rather than transformed them for the better. What better way to express hopelessness about an individual’s capacity for change than to execute him?

Writing in the early 1970s, however, the justices of the Burger Court did not anticipate how popular representations of capital punishment would turn that logic on its head in the decades to come. In the 1980s and 1990s, as death row populations were growing considerably and executions were becoming an increasingly regular occurrence, fictional films about the death penalty became an important vehicle through which punitive, retributive ideology gained power. Rather than pandering to Americans’ resentment of the criminal, though, they crafted a vision of the death penalty as spiritually beneficial to the condemned as well as the community his crime had harmed.

While they demonstrated the redemptive power of a death sentence, these films also sought to purge capital punishment of its historical association with white supremacy. At times only the condemned would benefit from their spiritual transformation in the shadow of the execution chamber. But at other times the inmate would stand in, as he did in colonial New England, for members of a society worried about its sinful history. In the hands of filmmakers, executions were more than acts of retribution and incapacitation. They were opportunities for personal, and sometimes cultural, redemption.

Whitewashing the Death Penalty

The historical use of the death penalty as a tool of white supremacy made its revival in the aftermath of the civil rights movement politically precarious. The death penalty had a long history of disproportionate use on African Americans, predating the Civil War. [9] Furthermore, its lopsided use in the early and mid-twentieth century as a punishment for black men accused of raping white women connected it to a horrifying history of public torture lynchings in the South. [10] In a culture that was now professing to be race blind, the death penalty stood out, to many, as a particularly potent symbol of a racist past.

Sexism had also shaped the use of the death penalty in the past. Lynch mobs and district attorneys had presented women as the beneficiaries of lethal punishment, its use on their alleged attackers a sign that the community recognized their vulnerability. A paternalistic attitude toward women also shaped, conversely, their perceived capacity for criminal agency. Executions ascribed to the condemned a degree of dangerousness and blameworthiness that few women were thought to have. States, as a result, rarely executed women, even when one accounts for their much lower homicide commission rates. [11]

Racism and sexism in the administration of the death penalty—evident in the disproportionately high execution rates of those who killed white people and the disproportionately low execution rates of women—continued into the modern era of the American death penalty. [12] In some ways this reflected the rightward political drift of white Americans. As violent crime rates doubled in the 1960s, so too did coded demands for law and order that were built on long-standing racist representations of African Americans as savage. [13] Indeed, Gregg was decided in 1976 at the beginning of an incarceration boom that would so disproportionately affect African American men that legal studies scholar Michelle Alexander has famously called it “the new Jim Crow.” [14]

Still, the appearance of race and gender relations had shifted considerably by the 1980s. The death penalty reemerged in a world where the rules of mainstream political discourse no longer permitted open avowal of the principles of white supremacy and patriarchy.

The sheer volume of studies focused on the role of racial bias following the resumption of executions in 1977 was itself an indicator of a heightened public sensitivity to race. While some studies questioned the existence of bias in meting out death sentences, [15] a substantial number confirmed the enduring salience of race in Americans’ support for and states’ use of the death penalty. States that have the death penalty, scholars found, were likely to be those with the greatest number of black residents. [16] Support for capital punishment in a given locale was associated with levels of black presence and racial prejudice. [17] Some white capital jurors still conceived of themselves as embattled moral insiders whose duty it was to punish racial outsiders, even as they actively disavowed the role race played in their decision making. [18] Perhaps most damning of all, the death penalty was disproportionately applied in cases where the victim was white. “Our data strongly suggests that Georgia is operating a dual system, based on the race of the victim, for processing homicide cases,” legal scholar David Baldus and his colleagues wrote in a study of capital punishment after Georgia had overhauled its statutes to meet the demands for sentencing fairness in Furman v. Georgia. All other factors being equal, they found that those convicted of killing whites were four times as likely to receive a death sentence as those convicted of killing nonwhites. The murder of a black person had to be much more heinous than that of a white person for prosecutors to seek, and juries to impose, a death sentence. [19]

All this evidence, however, was for naught. In 1987 lawyers for Warren McCleskey, a black death row inmate in Georgia, presented the Supreme Court with Baldus’s statistical evidence that, despite the new standards of “guided discretion,” juries were returning sentences that reflected the influence of unlawful bias. The Court nonetheless refused to overturn McCleskey’s death sentence. Statistical patterns were not enough, it said, to prove discriminatory intent. “We decline to assume that what is unexplained is invidious,” the Court wrote, backing away from the commitment it had made in Furman to ensuring fair outcomes in capital cases. [20]

Thus, in the law, race-based arguments against the death penalty went nowhere. In the cultural life of capital punishment, however, they were periodically given a public hearing. The result, though, was the same. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, Hollywood films assured audiences that antiblack racism no longer infected the practice of capital punishment in the United States. [21] State killing, they showed, was an act that primarily targeted white people and was carried out by racially diverse prison personnel. [22] Racist white men, not the black victims of racism, were the objects of punishment in these films. The death penalty might be objectionable for a whole host of reasons, these films collectively suggested, but racism was not among them.

One of the simplest changes in modern death penalty films was the visual alignment of people of color with the killing state. Films of this era differed from their predecessors in their frequent portrayals of African Americans as wardens, guards, and prosecutors. In The Execution of Raymond Graham, a 1985 ABC made for television movie that was filmed live for audiences, African American actor Morgan Freeman portrayed a compassionate, professional prison warden who, in the teleplay’s final scene, somberly gives the signal to start the lethal injection that kills Raymond Graham, a white inmate. [23] Last Light, a 1993 television movie starring Kiefer Sutherland and Forest Whitaker, depicted the unlikely friendship that flourishes between a black prison guard (Whitaker) and his poor white ward (Sutherland) on death row. [24] Toward the end of The Chamber, a 1996 film version of the John Grisham novel, a white death row inmate apologizes for his racism to a black guard, who sympathetically accepts his apology. [25] Finally, in Better Off Dead, a 1993 made for television movie produced by Gloria Steinem for the Lifetime cable television network, Tyra Ferrell played Cutter Dubuque, an African American prosecutor who is upset that “nobody in this country gets the death penalty for killing a black man.” [26] When Kit Kellner (Mare Winningham), a poor white woman, kills a black man, Dubuque gets her chance to right this wrong.

Conscious efforts to avoid racial stereotypes may have contributed to the inverted racial dynamics of some of these films. [27] Writing about The Execution of Raymond Graham in 1986, the New York Times quoted a producer from ABC who acknowledged that Raymond Graham was white when “the great majority of convicts on death row are black.” [28] “There are almost no ethnic villains on television,” he claimed. “Almost every villain you see is a WASP,” the result of network censors anxious to avoid the ire of “pressure groups” concerned with negative stereotyping. [29]

However noble or politically calculating the reason for making Graham and the condemned inmates in other death penalty films white, the effect was a whitewashing of the death penalty. By portraying African Americans as both decision makers and dutiful civil servants whose work involved them in the execution of white men and women, these films inverted the racial lines that had long divided those operating the machinery of the killing state and those subjected to it. The effect was a tacit cultural denial that racism still underlay the death penalty in America.

Some films went further and depicted white death row inmates as the literal and metaphorical victims of African American men. In Better Off Dead, the made for television movie, a poor white woman is sentenced to death for killing a black man who had attempted to rape her. [30] Kit, the protagonist, is a con artist; she runs an elaborate extortion scheme in which she seduces men and then cries rape when her boyfriend arrives upon the scene posing as a police officer. In this encounter, however, the boyfriend does not show up on time, and her would-be victim actually does become an attacker, overpowering her when she tries to leave. In the scuffle that follows, she gets ahold of the man’s gun and shoots him dead. He was, we learn, an undercover police officer and his murder is thus a capital crime.

In showing a white victim of an attempted rape sentenced to death for killing her would-be rapist, the film reversed the roles that black men and white women have historically occupied in capital cases. Rather than a punishment levied against a black man convicted of raping a white woman, the death penalty is here used on a white woman who kills her black would-be rapist. The film cultivates sympathy for Kit—and takes its broader stand against the death penalty—by presenting the condemned white woman as the victim of black sexual predation. The film’s strategy—opposing the death penalty while earnestly evoking one of the most common conceits in the racist white imagination—illustrates just how bizarrely Freudian the racial politics of death penalty films in the modern era could be.

Tapping into contemporary white anxiety about white disadvantage in an age of pluralism, the 1996 film Last Dance told a story of “reverse racism” on death row. Sharon Stone played Cindy Liggett, a condemned white woman who murdered a white teenage couple while under the influence of drugs. She has changed in the years since her death sentence and is haunted by her past. As Liggett’s execution draws near, she develops a relationship with Rick Hayes, a young lawyer working for the state’s clemency commission who finds in Cindy an excellent candidate for commutation. Threatening Liggett’s case, however, is a black death row inmate, John Henry Reese, who is also up for execution. Reese, we learn, is a trickster who has shrewdly manipulated white guilt to his advantage. A black version of Caryl Chessman, he has written a best-selling book that has drawn A-list Americans to his cause. Both the “top cardiovascular surgeon in New York City” and the dean of Yale Law School have made pleas for clemency on his behalf. He brags to Hayes,

I’ve strategized all my appeals, you know. I taught myself. I’ve taken control of the killing machine. Look at me. . . . What is the smart money saying, huh? I mean, who’s gonna live, me or the white girl? Who’s he gonna forgive? A man of color who earned a law degree, who wrote a best-seller and won the admiration of some of our best people, or a white trash girl who bludgeoned two people to pulp without blinking an eye? They will be diminished by my death ’cause I represent everything they love and admire. How they gonna go and kill a man who has been on the New York Times best-seller list? [31]

The question, of course, is rhetorical, and in his quest to save Liggett, Hayes learns an unexpected lesson about the politics of the death penalty. Turning the race-based justice system on its head, the governor grants clemency to Reese and signs Liggett’s death warrant—all, conveniently, on the same day. Liggett becomes a sacrificial lamb to a powerful black electorate demanding racial parity in punishment. Rather than depicting the killing state as a an expression of racially charged anxieties about crime, Last Dance portrayed African Americans as the beneficiaries—and even manipulators—of death penalty politics.

While most death penalty films grappled with race in stories set in the present, two films of the period tackled the racist history of the death penalty directly in stories set in the past. These films, too, ultimately worked to weaken the perception of the death penalty as a tool of racial repression. Perversely, one of them, the top-grossing death penalty film of all time, presented execution as a source of black liberation. In Frank Darabont’s 1999 blockbuster The Green Mile, John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan), a towering developmentally disabled black man, is sent to Louisiana’s death row—the “green mile”—in 1935 after being wrongly convicted of the prototypical lynching crime, the rape and murder of two blonde six-year-old sisters. He was, in fact, with the girls at the time of their deaths, but he had come upon them after they had been left for dead and was caught attempting to bring them back to life. Coffey, the film shows us, has a Christlike power that enables him to heal the suffering by (literally) sucking out of them the evil that torments them—disease, injury, hatred. His actions are misinterpreted by the white posse that discovers him trying to help the girls, and Coffey is swiftly sentenced to death after a sham trial. His own defense attorney refers to him as a “mongrel dog.” [32] A black man facing execution in a southern state during the 1930s, Coffey embodies the pain of the nation’s history of racial injustice.

The film presents itself as enlightened—sensitive to the racism of a bygone world in which white Americans saw black subordination as both a prerequisite to white freedom and the gravest threat to it. In demonstrating just how wrong the image of Coffey as a menacing predator is, the film depicts him, in a no less problematic way, as a happy subordinate. In healing white people in pain, the saintly Coffey magically and lovingly does what enslaved African Americans literally did for white Americans, taking on, in their unpaid labor, the physical and emotional burdens of white existence. He also alleviates fears of black threats to white freedom. His gigantic stature (a point made when he must duck his head to enter his cell) suggests that he could overcome his captors, but we watch as he submits easily to them (see fig. 1). Indeed, he initially scares, but then brings relief to, Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks), the well-meaning guard in charge of death row who has been suffering from a urinary tract infection. Coffey unexpectedly grabs Edgecomb’s crotch through the bars of his cell, sucking the evil of the infection out of Edgecomb’s body and restoring, we see in a subsequent scene, Edgecomb’s ability to have sex with his wife. Coffey, in short, is the antithesis of the physical and sexual threat to white supremacy that black men have occupied in the racist imagination. In him we find a gentle giant who wants to enable, not threaten, white freedom; to restore, not usurp, white virility; to take away, not create, white pain. [33] Edgecomb soon becomes convinced of Coffey’s innocence.

Image

Coffey, though, has grown tired of his role as a repository for the world’s pain. Death by execution, he says, will allow him to escape his Christ-like role as a black sufferer of white sins. And it will give, most importantly, white Americans—embodied by Edgecomb—the opportunity to redeem themselves by taking back the pain they had historically off-loaded onto African Americans. As his execution day draws near, Coffey declines Edgecomb’s offer to help him escape from the prison. Edgecomb pleads with him, anticipating the unbearable guilt he will feel for Coffey’s death: “When I stand before God and he asks me why did I kill one of his true miracles, what am I going to say?” he asks Coffey. Coffey replies,

You tell God the father it was a kindness you done. I know you’re hurting and worrying. I can feel it on you. But you ought to quit on it now. I want it to be over and done with. I do. I’m tired, boss. Tired of being on the road, lonely as a sparrow in the rain. I’m tired of never having me a buddy to be with, to tell me where we’s going to, coming from, or why. Mostly, I’m tired of people being ugly to each other. I’m tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world every day. There’s too much of it. It’s like pieces of glass in my head all the time. Can you understand? [34]

Edgecomb acquiesces to Coffey’s wish to die, and with the black Christ figure’s execution, the film seems to complete the allegorical narrative it has set up. But John Coffey’s death is not a sacrifice that relieves white humanity of its sins; it is a mechanism for allowing whites to expiate their racial sins in a new way. Because he presided over Coffey’s execution, the audience learns, Edgecomb has taken on the sins of a white supremacist world. He expiates white sin not through dying, but through living. Edgecomb, the film’s final scene reveals, has lived well past one hundred, his extended stay on the planet a kind of stay in purgatory that is cleansing him—and the white humanity he embodies—of the sins of a white supremacist past. [35]

The Green Mile, then, makes capital punishment the crucial catalyst in a story about the expiation of white sin. The film depicts a rabidly racist South in order to reassure us of its place in a backwards past that from which black and white Americans have fled. Execution in the Louisiana execution chair serves, perversely, as a mechanism of black relief from a racist world. The assumption of guilt for white supremacy by a faultless, enlightened white southerner, meanwhile, represents a sacrifice for white humanity, a working off of a collective white debt for a racist past that is, like Edgecomb’s anticipated death, mercifully on the horizon.

A Lesson Before Dying, a 1999 television movie based on Ernest J. Gaines’s best-selling 1993 novel, presented a different vision of the death penalty as a vehicle for black liberation. In the film Jefferson, a poor young black man played by Mekhi Phifer, is accidentally present at the scene of a murder of a white shopkeeper and is caught with his hand in the cash register when the police arrive. His trial is grossly unfair: Jefferson’s defense attorney compares his client to a hog, arguing that he ought not be punished because he does not have a conscience. The defense attorney’s belittling rhetoric is meant to illustrate the depths of southern injustice. Nonetheless, the film initially presents Jefferson in a similar, albeit kinder, light, as childlike. He cannot read. He does not speak. He seems indifferent to the imminence of his execution. Jefferson’s mother enlists a local black schoolteacher, Grant Wiggins (Don Cheadle), to “turn him into a man” before his execution, and the bulk of the film depicts Wiggins’s efforts to reach Jefferson. His efforts are ultimately successful. By the end of the film, Jefferson has transformed from a docile, weak “boy” into a literate critical thinker. [36]

While the film seems to depict the death penalty as a tool of racist repression, it presents the imposition of a death sentence as an occasion for the empowerment of a young black man, a transformation of his self-image that would not otherwise have happened. From the education system to the prison system, the state has treated Jefferson as if he were a hog. Death at the hands of the state, we are shown, becomes a means for Jefferson to transcend the state’s racist treatment of him, to reject the racist appraisal of his value that he had internalized. Men like Jefferson may well die as the result of racist inequality, the film seems to say, but they can at least die as men and undercut the racism of the system. In what the film presents as a tragic trade, dignity compensates Jefferson for his loss of life. From a contemporary perspective, such compensation is absurd—Who cares if you have dignity if you’re dead?—but the film’s point is that in a world governed by intractable racial hierarchies, resistance is still possible. The manhood Jefferson achieves as his execution approaches renders illegitimate the racist logic underlying southern hierarchies. In truth, though, the material consequence of the execution, which the film tellingly does not depict on-screen, is still a dead black man.

From casting decisions that showed African Americans as representatives of the killing state to the portrayal of whiteness as a liability for condemned inmates to a self-actualization execution narrative about an illiterate black man on death row, Hollywood worked, in the post-Gregg period, to distance the death penalty from its racist past or to distort the severity of that past. Yet at the same time it tried to atone for that past. In the character of Paul Edgecomb, viewers of The Green Mile encountered a carrier of white guilt whose burden, the film reassured, would soon be lifted. Collectively, these films raised the anxieties created by historical memory—but they did so to reconstruct, rather than dismantle, the killing state. Through its on-screen exorcisms of a racist past, the cultural life of capital punishment made the new American death penalty consonant with a society that had dismantled, once and for all, old hierarchies.

The Martyr as Sinner: New Directions in Existential Execution Narratives

In the modern era of capital punishment, death penalty films distinguished themselves from their early- and mid-twentieth century predecessors not only through their thematic engagement with race but also through their portrayal of the condemned.

Whereas films in earlier periods depicted the condemned as innocent or their crimes as excusable, films of the post-Gregg period featured men and women who were guilty of inexcusable crimes that had destroyed the lives of innocents. With a seventeenth century religious sensibility, these films showed how a death sentence transformed the condemned from a reckless, sinful wretch into a self-disciplined, morally grounded adult. Dead Man Walking (1995), The Chamber (1996), [37] Last Dance (1996), [38] and Last Light (1993) [39] all depicted dispossessed, guilty white people who found in their executions the opportunity to expiate their sins and gain release from a sinful past.

In some ways this was a surprising development. In our backlash-centered accounts of a nation that repurposed its criminal justice system in the late twentieth century, retribution and incapacitation displaced rehabilitation as the primary purpose of criminal punishment. [40] In these explanations, the state gave up an ambitious goal of rehabilitating prisoners and replaced it with a more modest but accomplishable one: delivering to offenders the pain they deserved for their wicked acts and preventing them, through confinement or death, from harming others. The return of the death penalty symbolized a newfound consensus against redemption.

The gallows conversions these films depicted, and the compassionate feelings they cultivated for their condemned protagonists, do not fit into this narrative easily. They do fit, however, into a slightly different story about the rise of a punitiveness that effectively manipulated sympathy as well as antipathy for criminals. These films engineered a positive image of the death penalty by subtly acknowledging and assuaging two anxieties that the death penalty, and the broader political culture that supported it, could inspire.

The first was a humanist anxiety that the death penalty was an intolerable affront to human dignity. Indeed, its revival in the United States represented a significant cultural break with the rest of the Western world. Since the end of World War II, Western European states had gradually been abolishing the death penalty, a process that was completed with France’s abandonment of capital punishment in 1981. In European human rights discourse, it became axiomatic that the death penalty was a gross violation of human rights. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union in 2000 codified a right to life that explicitly forbade the death penalty. As abolitionism spread across Europe, a vocal abolitionist minority in the United States pointed to the European break with the death penalty as evidence that the United States had become a shameful exception to a rising respect for human dignity amongst western states.

The second anxiety was inchoate. A broader contradiction of the welfare state had generated new psychological and economic pressures on many Americans. By the mid-1980s, a new political-economic perspective, adopted by Republicans and Democrats alike, was becoming dominant in the United States. Neoliberalism—a revival of the classical economic liberalism of the eighteenth century—justified the deregulation of industries and the adoption of free trade agreements that accelerated the movement of industrial production to countries with cheaper labor costs. It offered, moreover, a harsh assessment of the welfare state, arguing that the free market was a better supplier of many of the social goods the state had secured since the 1930s. Ideologically, neoliberalism reflected and reinforced  the retributive criminal justice policies that were expanding the size of the nation’s prison and death row populations. Both neoliberalism and retributivism extolled individual responsibility and denied structural explanations for poverty or crime. Together, they formed the foundation of a political culture that blamed people for their bad acts (criminal justice) or their economic failures (neoliberal policy) and justified the consequences they incurred when they failed to abide by the law or maintain economic solvency.

Those who had prospered most from the welfare state—working-class white Americans—felt its retrenchment keenly. As automation and deindustrialization put many industrial workers out of jobs and trade unions lost political power, a downward pressure on real wages for unskilled and low-skilled labor was felt across the working class, even as productivity and gross domestic product rose. [41] A faith in personal responsibility, so integral to retributive and neoliberal ideologies, often contradicted their own lived experiences as their manufacturing jobs migrated overseas. Having been born into a world in which living wage jobs for those with a high school education felt like a birthright, many now watched anxiously as their economic horizons receded through no fault of their own. [42]

Two anxieties, then—one rooted in doubts about the humaneness of capital punishment, the other rooted in doubts about the foundations of a culture of responsibility—surfaced, at times, in death penalty films of the modern era. Two films, in particular, worked through these anxieties in notable ways. Dead Man Walking (1995) and The Chamber (1996) wrestled explicitly with the fear that the death penalty was an intolerable affront to human dignity. Implicitly, they portrayed anxieties about working-class white men’s solvency in an era of wealth polarization and downward pressure on wages. In both cases, punishment perversely provides relief from these anxieties. Both films revealed how sympathy for the condemned could be mobilized in ways that ultimately made the death penalty seem morally appropriate.

Dead Man Walking, Tim Robbins’s 1995 feature film starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon, is the best known and most discussed of the spate of death penalty movies released in the mid-1990s. [43] Penn played Matthew Poncelet, a white death row inmate convicted of participating in the rape and murder of a white teenage couple. Sarandon played Helen Prejean, a nun who works with the poor in New Orleans and agrees to write to Poncelet as a favor to a friend. Their correspondence leads to a meeting at Angola State Penitentiary, where Prejean encounters a bitter, angry racist who complains about welfare-entitled “niggers” while insisting that he has truly been wronged by the state. He refuses to take responsibility for his part in the murders, insisting that he was a bystander. But if Poncelet seems to be in deep denial, he also seems somewhat amenable to change. Prejean challenges him when he complains about “welfare-taking coloreds sucking up tax dollars” who “make themselves out as victims.” “I don’t know any victims,” she says of the black people in her life. “I know a lot of cool people, hardworking.” Poncelet eventually is moved to admit that he likes rebels and that some black people can be good rebels: “Martin Luther King led people to DC, kicked the white man’s butt,” Poncelet says. “He put up a fight, wasn’t lazy.” “So it’s lazy people you don’t like,” Prejean suggests, not black people. “Can we talk about something else?” Poncelet responds, backed into a corner, the wheels in his brain spinning with this new idea.

Poncelet’s obsession with strength, with kicking butt, Prejean soon realizes, issues from his own internalized sense of impotence. When she visits Poncelet’s mother, who does not have money for food, let alone a funeral for her soon to be executed son, we see the poverty Poncelet experienced as a child. “Life’s plowed them over,” Prejean later tells her family. Impotence, rather than evil, is the source of Poncelet’s swastika tattoos, his delusions of grandeur, and his plan to use his last words to excoriate the families of his victims. [44] Understanding the etiology of Poncelet’s bullish pride allows her to intervene effectively in his thought processes. She disarms and seduces him, espousing a theology that is more evangelical than Catholic. Breaking ranks with the prison’s orthodox chaplain, Prejean tells Poncelet that the mindless parroting of doctrine is insufficient to gain salvation. “Redemption isn’t some kind of free admission ticket you get because Jesus paid the price,” she tells him. “You gotta participate in your own redemption. You got some work to do.” [45] Poncelet’s problem, we have learned by this point, is that he had fallen under the influence of misguided peers because he had never learned to think for himself.

As the execution draws near and Poncelet’s appeals are exhausted, the film turns from the question of whether he will die to whether he will die redeemed. Will Poncelet leave the world a hateful, remorseless, bitter man? Or will he take responsibility for his crimes, find goodness in himself, and leave the world as a spiritually transformed man? In the final, climactic moments of the film, as Poncelet waits in the holding cell that is his final stop before the execution chamber, the audience gets its answer. Spouting his anger at the situation that led him to the scene of the crime, where he still maintains he did nothing to instigate the violence, Poncelet is interrupted by Prejean. “Don’t blame the drugs,” she says to him, cutting him off. “You could have walked away. Don’t blame [your accomplice]. You blame him. You blame drugs. You blame the government. You blame blacks. You blame the [victim’s family]. You blame the kids for being there. What about Matthew Poncelet? Is he just an innocent, a victim?” With the clock ticking toward execution time, this moment of tough love finally does the trick. He confesses his involvement in the crime to Prejean in an emotional outpouring. “Do you take responsibility for both of their deaths?” she asks him. “Yes ma’am,” he responds. “When the lights dimmed last night I kneeled and prayed for them kids. I never done that before.” As he confesses, Poncelet breaks down into tears, his voice trembling as he speaks (see fig. 2). The scene is intensely erotic; indeed, Prejean lets out an orgasmic exhale when Poncelet confesses, her spiritual seduction of Poncelet having finally achieved its goal. “Oh, Matt,” she breathily responds. “There are spaces of sorrow only God can touch. You did a terrible thing, Matt, a terrible thing. But you have dignity now. Nobody can take that from you. You are a son of God, Matthew Poncelet.” [46]

Self-abasement becomes, for Poncelet, the way to spiritual wealth. His confession elicits an outpouring of love from Prejean, escalating their intimacy and providing him a security he had never felt before. As if to underscore the point, the film repeats the trope moments later. When Poncelet learns he cannot wear his boots to the execution chamber, he breaks down again and begins to have a childish tantrum of frustrated masculinity. Prejean, though, quickly intervenes, telling him, “Look, I want the last thing you see in this world to be a face of love. So you look at me...when they do this thing. You look at me. I’ll be the face of love for you.” With Prejean offering him loving support, Poncelet delivers his final words with grace in the execution chamber. The gurney standing upright and his arms outstretched as in a crucifixion, he says, trembling, to his victim’s family, “I don’t want to leave this world with any hate in my heart. I ask your forgiveness for what I done. It was a terrible thing I done in taking your son away from you....I hope my death gives you some relief.” His death offers a relief for him as well; it is a liberating testament to his escape from the harmful mental schemas that had dominated him for so long. The man who shocked Prejean earlier in the film by blithely comparing himself to Jesus dies in a Christlike posture, a “son of God,” as Prejean puts it. Poncelet martyrs his body for his spirit—a Christ figure dying not for the sins of humanity, but for the sins of his former self. [47]

Image

Image Caption

Moments before his execution in Dead Man Walking (1995), Mathew Poncelet confesses his crime to Helen Prejean and, in admitting his vulnerability, is freed from the hateful mental schemas that had dominated him.

Dead Man Walking had a political-economic subtext that provides insight into the welfare-oriented meaning that retributive punishment could have in a libertarian culture. Interestingly, the film’s psychological analysis of Poncelet resembles the liberal explanation for black criminality most famously voiced in Senator Daniel Moynihan’s 1967 report, “The Negro Family.” [48] Moynihan had explained black criminality as one of a host of social problems that stemmed from a lack of access to good-paying jobs. Unable to provide for their families, he theorized, black men abandoned their fatherly obligations. The absence of fathers earning breadwinner wages had resulted in a pathological black culture mired in social problems like crime. Dead Man Walking applied that logic to its poor white protagonist. The fatherless, impoverished Poncelet, Prejean learns, has adopted a racist, bullish identity in an effort to overcome his feelings of economic dispossession. That swaggering masculinity, masking profound insecurity and impressionability, lead him to commit his depraved act of violence. Taking a cue from “The Negro Family,” the proper response, the film suggests, is a sympathetic recognition of the offender’s vulnerability and a commitment to investing him with the dignity he has lacked. That, however, is where the similarity ends. Whereas Moynihan argued that the state ennobled undisciplined men by expanding their economic horizons, Dead Man Walking suggested that punishment, not provision, catalyzes moral maturation. Dignity could not be bought for men by the state; they had to earn it.

Poncelet’s achievement of dignity through suffering reflected and reinforced the broader role that pain played in neoliberal thought. [49] In antiwelfare rhetoric, pain or the threat of pain creates incentives for human beings to develop themselves into people worthy of recognition. Dead Man Walking carried that logic from the marketplace to the prison. The pain of his impending execution breaks Matthew Poncelet. It makes him receptive to Prejean’s influence, prompts him to abandon the corrosive ideologies that have dominated him, and enables his transformation into a man worthy of love. In return for his apology, Poncelet gains from Prejean positive recognition of his vulnerability. Her authentic love dissolves his false pride; the comforts of loving interdependence replace the pressures of performing a cartoonish, Gary Gilmore–like version of the convict-cowboy. Yet the love is consummated by a “manning up,” by taking full responsibility for his crimes. The endurance of harsh punishment becomes a way of achieving recognition that Poncelet and those like him never found in the political or labor marketplace. [50]

Studying these final scenes, abolitionist critics of Dead Man Walking have written that, despite the liberal viewpoint of its director, Tim Robbins, the film ultimately endorses a “conservative cultural sensibility” by making Poncelet’s acceptance of responsibility its climactic moment. [51] It does so, however, in a nuanced way. “Personal responsibility” in the film is more than a glib justification for harsh punishment; it is instead a spiritual destination. The process of holding Poncelet responsible reveals his profound sense of dispossession, locates it in his race, gender, and class position, and offers a compensatory recognition of his goodness in exchange for his penitence.

In this way the film reconciled the rehabilitative concerns of the welfare state with the violence of the killing state and the austerity of the neoliberal state. Indeed, the death penalty functions here, as Caryl Chessman once put it, as a kind of “shock therapy.” [52] The setting of the execution date provides the shock, and Prejean provides the therapy. Poncelet is penetrated, finally, not by representatives of the paternalistic state or the hierarchical church, but by an irreverent outsider who, by tempering a conservative commitment to accountability with a liberal recognition of his vulnerability, opens him up to a divine understanding of right and wrong and reconstitutes him as a responsible member of the moral community. He adopts, in the end, a moral vision of the world that aligns with conservative politics—one in which deprivation is no excuse for immoral behavior. He does so, though, not as the result of some forced, paternalistic adjustment to social norms, but through a spiritual rebirth facilitated by a woman.

A similar spiritual reconstitution occurs in The Chamber (1996). Based on the best-selling novel by John Grisham, The Chamber told the story of Sam Cayhall (Gene Hackman), an aging white supremacist about to be executed, decades after the fact, for the death of two little girls in a 1960s bombing of a Jewish civil rights lawyer’s office in Mississippi. Belatedly sentenced to death for the bombing, Cayhall is unrepentant. He protects the white elites who cravenly manipulated him into committing the crime by maintaining that he acted alone. Like Poncelet, he is a white man whose racism is a response to an internal self-loathing that made him easily manipulated by those who convinced him that his value lay in his skin color. That shallow basis for his self-worth has had devastating consequences. His crime, we learn, has shattered his own children; his son killed himself in shame, and his daughter became an alcoholic.

Over the course of the film, though, an ongoing dialogue with his grandson Adam Hall (Chris O’Donnell), a northern lawyer working on his appeal, softens Cayhall, prompting his maturation. Cayhall reestablishes contact with his alcoholic daughter Lee Bowen, who is haunted not only by the bombing but also by a childhood spent watching her father lash out in criminal acts of racist violence. As a little girl she had watched helplessly while her father shot and killed an African American man in a petty dispute. Reconciling with her father in a death row visiting room, Bowen finally gets some relief. His voice cracking in sorrow, Cayhall reassures his daughter that she bore no responsibility for his crimes. Seeing the devastation he has caused his daughter, Cayhall exhibits sorrow for his sins.

As in Dead Man Walking, the film suggests that self-loathing underlies white violence, and that harsh punishment offered the chance for condemned white men to abandon their false pride, acknowledge their vulnerability, and accept responsibility for their violence. Through his execution, Cayhall takes on his shoulders the sins of moderate white southerners, personified by his daughter, who witnessed racial violence during the classical phase of the civil rights movement but did nothing to stop it. Right before his execution, Cayhall expresses to Hall, just as Poncelet did to Prejean, full-fledged remorse for his acts, admitting to his grandson, “Of all the people and things I hated my whole life, the one that I hated the most was me. I was given free entry into this world to make of it whatever I could. I’ve been sitting here for sixteen years, just thinking about how I never did anybody any good. Then you came down.” He renounces his attitude toward his son, Hall’s father, whose suicide he had earlier called a sign of weakness. “See, if I’m gonna be proud of you I gotta be proud of your daddy,” he says. “He wasn’t weak; he was strong—strong enough to give you whatever you got.” [53] In giving his grandson the love he withheld from his son, Cayhall abandons a conception of strength as impenetrability. As his final act before walking into the gas chamber, he removes a leather bracelet adorned with symbols of white supremacy and hurls it against the wall. White racism is, in the end, a symptom of personal insecurity that Cayhall has finally overcome.

The credit for this breakthrough, and for the racial reconciliation that follows, goes to the death penalty. Cayhall’s proximity to death ultimately catalyzes his penitence and releases him from the corrosive racism that has ruined his life. It is not until the eleventh hour, when death is imminent, that he decides to sign the affidavit that implicates prominent white citizens in the bombing. As he goes to his death, the audience gets the satisfaction of seeing a montage of the arrests of the white elites Cayhall had been been protecting. [54] He apologizes, too, to a black guard who had treated him kindly, making personal as well as political amends for his crimes.

The Chamber demonstrates the virtue of the death penalty by pushing its audience to see that Cayhall’s death does more than satisfy the vulgar bloodlust of a public hell-bent on his destruction. While the film disapprovingly depicts the Mississippi governor whipping a crowd into a frenzy outside the penitentiary, it imagines its own audience as a second, more enlightened execution crowd that appreciates the therapeutic benefit of execution for the penitent Cayhall and his sympathetic family. [55] Capital punishment has done what imprisonment did not: it has liberated Cayhall from his pride and transformed his soul. [56] Indeed, responding to the film, a reviewer for the New York Times observed, somewhat nonplussed, that “although Mr. Grisham is evidently no friend of the death penalty, ‘The Chamber’ may be read as a tribute to the redemptive value of being sentenced to be gassed.” [57]

In Dead Man Walking and The Chamber, audiences found two white men whose violent crimes were symptomatic of an entitled, bullish temperament. Over the course of the films, though, they learned that the men’s crimes were in reality an overcompensating response to feelings of insecurity. Like the imagined criminal in mid-twentieth-century criminology, the films ascribed horrifying violence not to an excess of freedom but to a deficit of it. Cayhall’s and Poncelet’s violence resulted, audiences saw, from a deep-seated class- and race-based sense of impotence. Unlike their mid-century predecessors, though, the therapeutic response these films prescribed was not counseling alone but counseling in the shadow of the execution chamber. Preparing to die became a liberating experience of letting go of stubborn pride, admitting a vulnerability one has fought so long to conceal, and finding intimacy with another person. These men experience true freedom when they come to see themselves as part of a moral community that they betrayed.

By depicting the condemned as white men who achieved redemption by preparing for their executions, Dead Man Walking and The Chamber fantasized that capital punishment, and the retributive ideology that underlay it, did not simply recognize a criminal’s moral agency (as the last words traditions do) but catalyzed its emergence in him.

Beyond the Box Office

While fictional narratives of redemption flourished on-screen, real-life claims of redemption by condemned inmates got little response from governors and pardon boards. [58] Efforts on behalf of two condemned inmates whose claims of rehabilitation made them causes célèbres captured the nation’s attention in the 1990s and 2000s. In 1998, thousands of Americans rallied to save the life of Karla Faye Tucker, a white woman Texas planned to execute for murdering a man and his girlfriend with a pickax while they slept. Tucker had become a born-again Christian on death row and had impressed community leaders and prison officials alike with the depth of her repentance and the genuineness of her transformation. Although they are normally more likely to support harsh, retributive forms of punishment than members of other branches of Christianity, [59] evangelical Christians wrote thousands of letters to Governor Ann Richards in 1992, urging her to commute Tucker’s sentence. [60] Her story so moved evangelical minister Pat Robertson that he changed his opinion on capital punishment and said he thought mercy should be shown to those who, like Tucker, had demonstrated “a genuine change of heart.” [61]

Redemption was also at the heart of the efforts to save the life of Stanley “Tookie” Williams, a black former gang leader who was executed in California in 2005. Williams had apologized for his role in founding the Crips, renounced gang violence, written a series of children’s books with antigang messages, and been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He too had amassed a host of supporters, including Jamie Foxx, who played Williams in Redemption, a made for television movie that aired in 2004.

Despite massive media attention to their cases, both Tucker and Williams failed to win clemency. A number of factors explain their fates. Critics of Williams imputed to him some of the darker qualities of individualism. He was, some said, a manipulative swindler, and his claims of redemption were only a calculated ruse. “I don’t think a murderer like Stanley Williams can be reformed,” Nancy Ruhe-Much, executive director of the victims’ rights organization Parents of Murdered Children, told the New York Times. “I think he’s just writing these books because he wants to get off death row.” [62] Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, perceived a toxic pride in Williams’s refusal to acknowledge his guilt for the crime that had landed him on death row. “Is Williams’ redemption complete and sincere, or is it just a hollow promise?” he asked near the end of a statement explaining his decision to deny Williams clemency. “Stanley Williams insists he is innocent, and that he will not and should not apologize or otherwise atone for the murders of the four victims in this case. Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings there can be no redemption. In this case, the one thing that would be the clearest indication of complete remorse and full redemption is the one thing Williams will not do.” [63]

But even when most observers were convinced that redemption was real, as they were in Tucker’s case, clemency was not compatible with a larger commitment to equality. For many, it was clear that support for Tucker was linked to her gender; she was to become the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War. [64] To some concerned with gender parity, granting Tucker clemency would affirm an older paternalistic way of thinking that treated women as juveniles who could never be as responsible for a heinous crime as a man could be. One feminist abolitionist publicly chose death for Tucker over the sexist paternalism that clemency would represent: “As much as I am opposed to the death penalty, it should show no gender bias,” argued Robyn Blumer in the St. Petersburg Times. “Faux Victorian notions that women are defenseless beings who need to be protected from harm and who lack the physical or mental capabilities to do harm themselves” still plagued the nation, she wrote. Those notions were “the last vestige of institutionalized sexism that needs to be rubbed out. Ironically, as Texas will soon discover, gal murderers may be perfect for the task.” [65] That logic seems to have played a role in Governor George W. Bush’s denial of clemency for Tucker. His spokesperson Karen Hughes took up the question of gender in explaining his refusal to grant a stay of execution. “The gender of the murderer did not make any difference to the victims,” she said, echoing nearly word for word a line spoken two years earlier by the fictional governor in the film Last Dance. [66]

Hollywood films, however, may also offer an additional reason why the redeemed so often failed to earn clemency in the modern era of capital punishment. In a more modern, secular form, Hollywood brought back into popular consciousness a comforting, antiquated, and religious view of an execution as a wayward soul’s reentry into the moral community—or, as a guard in The Green Mile put it, becoming “square with the house again.” [67] Death, moreover, provided the ultimate test of the claim that rehabilitation had occurred. Being on the brink of death, we like to think, acts as a kind of truth serum. At the moment of execution, Linda Ross Meyer writes, describing this myth, “earthly incentives to lie or dissemble are presumed to be gone....It is an almost-perfectly Kantian moment, when one has the chance to act without concern for consequences, when the pressures of finitude are lifted and our position almost resembles the perfect being of reason who has no inclinations contrary to reason.” [68] It is in this moment, and this moment only, that we might discern the truthfulness of a rehabilitation claim. Redemption, Hollywood suggested, cannot excuse one from execution because execution is the very thing that makes redemption possible, and the only thing that makes it verifiable.

Conclusion

Writing thirty-five years and 1,057 executions after Justice Thurgood Marshall asserted in Furman v. Georgia that “death, of course, makes rehabilitation impossible,” Justice Anthony Kennedy, in a 2007 opinion, articulated philosophically what popular texts had taught Americans over the course of the post-Gregg era: retribution was, in the end, compatible with redemption. “It might be said that capital punishment is imposed,” Kennedy wrote, “because it has the potential to make the offender recognize at last the gravity of his crime.” [69]

Kennedy’s observation reflects just how dramatically the relation between capital punishment and human freedom had changed in the thirty-five years since retribution moved toward the center of public policy about punishment. In the punitive imagination, the death penalty was not simply an expression of backlash, but a generative kind of violence. Through execution stories, filmmakers affirmed the nation’s aspirational values: in on-screen execution chambers, the face of justice became black and brown as well as white, punishment oddly helped a nation transcend its racist past, and sinners found their goodness. All this, it must be noted, redounded to the benefit of a dominant white culture. In an age of pluralism, fictional executions became therapeutic experiences for white men and white audiences, opportunities for them to fantasize, both culturally and individually, about escaping the psychic burdens of personal responsibility for the past and the present. Indeed, in stoking fantasies and resolving anxieties about the freedom of the poor and nonwhite, films about capital punishment made it easier for retribution to take hold in post-Gregg America. Watching the experience of condemned inmates on the silver screen or on television, Americans found not racist and soul-crushing repression, but rather soul-elevating justice. Through its newly rediscovered capacity to rehabilitate, capital punishment was itself rehabilitated.

The legal and cultural imaginings of executable subjects, however, were only one way capital punishment reflected and reinforced the return of negative freedom to the center of American political culture. In the chapters to come, I turn to constructions of the killing state and its cultural proxies.

Daniel LaChance is associate professor of history at Emory University. His current book project, Empathy for the Devil: Executions in the American Imagination, examines journalistic and fictional accounts of executions since 1877.

Notes:

[1] Arthur Miller, The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts (New York: Penguin, 2003), 134.

[2] Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), and Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

[3] Halttunen, Murder Most Foul.

[4] The salvation of the condemned person’s soul was often at the heart of premodern execution rituals. In colonial New England, Puritans executed those they condemned to death after shrift periods in which the offender worshipped alongside them in church. Then, on execution day, clergy would urge the crowd to identify with the reformed sinner, to pray that God’s grace would save them all from hell. Halttunen, Murder Most Foul, and Banner, Death Penalty.

[5] The notion that a date with the gallows could catalyze the redemption of sinners persisted even after the arrival of the Enlightenment in North America pushed the state and civil society in secular directions. When abolitionist progressives like Benjamin Rush sought to replace the gallows with penitentiaries, conservative religious leaders balked. As Louis P. Masur explains, a number of them claimed the executed were more likely to be saved than the imprisoned. “Eternal reformation, the ascent from the gallows to glory, was far more important than far-fetched schemes for temporal reform,” they insisted. Louis P. Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 70.

[6] Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972) at 382 (Burger, Dissenting).

[7] Ibid. at 289-90 (Brennan, Concurring).

[8] Ibid. at 346 (Marshall, Concurring).

[9] Stuart Banner, “Traces of Slavery: Race and the Death Penalty in Historical Perspective,” in From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America, ed. Charles J. Ogletree Jr. and Austin Sarat (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

[10] David Garland, Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

[11] Andrea Shapiro, “Unequal before the Law: Men, Women and the Death Penalty,” American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and the Law 8 (2000): 427-70.

[12] For women it deepened. Twice as many women were killed from 1930 to 1967 (thirty-one) as were executed from 1977 to 2014 (fifteen), despite enormous population growth over that time. Data on women executed from 1930 to 1967 come from M. Watt Espy and John Ortiz Smykla, Executions in the United States, 1608-2002: The Espy File [computer file], 4th ICPSR ed., compiled by M. Watt Espy and John Ortiz Smykla (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, 2004). Data on women executed from 1977 to 2014 come from the Searchable Execution Database of the Death Penalty Information Center, available at http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/views-executions (accessed August 5, 2015). The finding of racial bias comes from Steven E. Barkan and Steven F. Cohn, “Racial Prejudice and Support for the Death Penalty by Whites,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 31 (1994): 202-9.

[13] On the rise of crime control as a strategy for manipulating anxiety about race, see Katherine Beckett, Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

[14] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010). On the role race has played in the incarceration boom, see also Michael Tonry, Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) also Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

[15] See John Blume, Theodore Eisenberg, and Martin T. Wells, “Explaining Death Row’s Population and Racial Composition,” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 1 (2004): 165-207; Lowell Dodge, Laurie E. Eckland, et al., “Death Penalty Sentencing,” in The Death Penalty in America, ed. Hugo A. Bedau (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Raymond Paternoster, Capital Punishment in America (New York: Lexington Books, 1991).

[16] David Jacobs and Jason T. Carmichael, “The Political Sociology of the Death Penalty: A Pooled Time-Series Analysis,” American Sociological Review 67 (2002): 109-31.

[17] Steven E. Barkan and Steven F. Cohn, “Racial Prejudice and Support for the Death Penalty by Whites,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 31 (1994): 202-9, and Joe Soss, Laura Langbein, and Alan R. Metelko, “Why Do White Americans Support the Death Penalty?” Journal of Politics 65 (2003): 397-421.

[18] Benjamin Fleury-Steiner, Jurors’ Stories of Death: How America’s Death Penalty Invests in Inequality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 8.

[19] David C. Baldus, Charles Pulaski, and George Woodworth, “Comparative Review of Death Sentences: An Empirical Study of the Georgia Experience,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 74 (1983): 661-753.

[20] McCleskey vs. Kemp 481 U.S. 279 (1987) at 313.

[21] While popular culture has sometimes mapped images of a comforting and familiar past onto newer social practices in order to soothe anxiety about change, in the case of the death penalty it operated on a landscape in which inertia—the nation’s failure to overcome its racist past—rather than change, was the source of anxiety. On the way, consumer capitalism was reconciled with nostalgia for traditional values, see George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).

[22] Only four films made more than passing reference to the execution of a black prisoner; the rest depicted or focused on the execution of a white inmate. Of the four films in which a black man’s execution earned more attention, only two depicted the actual execution. Of the two movies that did not depict the execution, in one the African American inmate was saved at the last minute by a white reporter, and in the other the execution occurred offscreen. These films were The Green Mile (1999), True Crime (1999), A Lesson Before Dying (2001), and Monster’s Ball (2001). On-screen executions of black men occur only in The Green Mile and Monster’s Ball. Only A Lesson Before Dying depicts the executed black man as a multilayered, complex character who changes over the course of the film. See Frank Darabont, The Green Mile, directed by Frank Darabont (1999; Hollywood, CA: Warner Home Video, 2007), DVD; Larry Gross, Stephen Schiff, and Paul Brickman, True Crime, directed by Clint Eastwood (1996; Hollywood, CA: Warner Home Video, 1999), DVD; Ann Peacock, A Lesson Before Dying, directed by Joseph Sargent (1999; Hollywood, CA: HBO Home Video, 2000), DVD; Milo Addica and Will Rokos, Monster’s Ball, directed by Marc Forster (2001; Hollywood, CA: Warner Home Video, 2002), DVD.

[23] David W. Rintels, Gerald I. Isenberg, Hans Proppe, Julian Marks, and Michael B. Seligman, The Execution of Raymond Graham, directed by Daniel Petrie (1985; Sunrise, FL: Alliance Entertainment, 2000), DVD.

[24] Robert Eisele, Mary McLaglen, and Charles Weinstock, Last Light, directed by Kiefer Sutherland (1993; Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate, 2007), DVD.

[25] William Goldman and Chris Reese, The Chamber, directed by James Foley (1996; Hollywood, CA: Universal Studios, 1998), DVD.

[26] Randy C. Baer and Marlane X. Meyer, Better Off Dead, directed by M. Neema Barnette (1993; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 1995), VHS.

[27] Raymond Graham was read by critics as a “protest against capital punishment,” and ABC pressured its producers to voice more pro–capital punishment sentiment in telling the story. Tom Shales, “The Deathwatch: ‘Execution’; ABC’s Gripping Live Drama,” Washington Post, November 18, 1985; Stephen Farber, “They Watch What We Watch: A Controversy Heats Up Over Whether TV’s Censors Do Too Much or Too Little,” New York Times, May 7, 1989. John Grisham’s opposition to the death penalty is widely known. Critics perceived his abolitionist viewpoint when The Chamber was first released as a novel. See, e.g., Walter Goodman, “Getting to Know Grandpa under Penalty of Death,” New York Times, July 29, 1994. Grisham’s subsequent 2006 nonfictional study of a wrongful conviction in An Innocent Man and his fictional treatment of that theme in The Confession in 2010 have continued to reveal the depths of his abolitionist commitment. Gloria Steinem was driven by similar motivations. As she explained to the Associated Press in an interview about the movie, “What too few people understand is that capital punishment has no impact on cutting down crime, and that there’s considerable evidence that it does the reverse: encourages crime. Worse, it is administered in such a way that the system waits until the person is rehabilitated. Then the sentence is finally carried out.” “Gloria Steinem Produces ‘Better Off Dead,’” Lodi (CA) News-Sentinel, January 14, 1993.

[28] Stephen Farber, “Minority Villains Are Touchy Network Topic,” New York Times, March 1, 1986. Bruce J. Sallan, ABC’s vice president of motion pictures for television, was wrong about this statistic. African Americans were disproportionately represented on death row, but they were not a strict numerical majority. In 1984, 585 of 1,405 persons under the sentence of death were black. Lawrence A. Greenfeld and David G. Hinners, “Capital Punishment 1984,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, 1985). Available at http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=3511 (accessed July 27, 2015).

[29] Farber, “Minority Villains.” This too was misleading because it did not consider minority representations on news programming. A sampling of news coverage in Chicago taken in 1989 found that African Americans most often appeared in news stories about violent crime when they were the perpetrators. Robert M. Entman, “Modern Racism and the Images of Blacks in Local Television News,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 7 (1990): 332-45. This claim was also challenged by a report that studied a sampling of television in 1987 and found that minorities on fictional television programming were more than twice as likely to be criminals or delinquents as their white counterparts. Marsha E. Williams and John C. Condry, “Living Color: Minority Portrayals and Cross-Racial Interactions on Television” (presentation, Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Kansas City, MO, April 1989). Available at http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED307025.pdf (accessed July 27, 2015).

[30] Her method of operation is to extort money from johns by threatening to accuse them of rape. Her white crime partner, also her boyfriend, bursts into the motel room and is shot by the cop. Kit shoots the officer while he’s down, then spits out the epithet “Nigger!” as she stands over his body.

[31] Steven Haft and Rob Koslow, Last Dance, directed by Bruce Beresford (1996; Hollywood, CA: Walt Disney Video, 2003), DVD.

[32] Darabont, Green Mile.

[33] Susan Gonzalez, “Director Spike Lee Slams ‘Same Old’ Black Stereotypes in Today’s Films,” Yale Bulletin and Calendar, March 2, 2001. Available at http://www.yale.edu/opa/arc-ybc/v29.n21/story3.html (accessed July 27, 2015).

[34] Darabont, Green Mile.

[35] In depicting sympathetic white men as the victims of a culture that unfairly holds them responsible for the historical oppression of women and minorities, the film was symptomatic of a broader trend in depictions of white masculinity in middlebrow culture of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Sally Robinson, Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). David Savran has also studied masochistic expressions of white masculinity in this period. See David Savran, Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

[36] Peacock, Lesson Before Dying.

[37] Goldman and Reese, Chamber.

[38] Haft and Koslow, Last Dance.

[39] Eisele, Last Light.

[40] As Roger Lancaster puts it, “A complex set of cultural values related to forbearance, forgiveness, rehabilitation, and second chances has progressively ceded ground to an equally complicated set of values that revolve around vigilance, accusation, detection, the assertion of guilt, and spectacles of punishment.” Roger Lancaster, Sex Panic and the Punitive State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 189.

[41] On neoliberalism, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), and James Ferguson, “The Uses of Neoliberalism,” Antipode 41 (2010): 166-84.

[42] George Lipsitz has argued that reactionary rhetoric worked to channel the frustration working-class white men felt as a result of neoliberal policies of dispossession. The source of their angst, socially conservative ideologies told them, was not economic policy change, but the cultural change wrought by the countercultural, feminist, gay, and civil rights movements. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, rev. and exp. ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).

[43] Tim Robbins, Dead Man Walking, directed by Tim Robbins (1995; Hollywood, CA: MGM, 2000), DVD.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Ibid.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Ibid.

[48] Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” Office of Policy Planning and Research (Washington, DC: US Department of Labor, 1965). Available at http://tinyurl.com/oqkt3xr (accessed July 27, 2015).

[49] I have previously explored this theme in representations of white men in prison films in the 1990s. See Daniel LaChance, “Rehabilitating Violence: White Masculinity and Harsh Punishment in 1990s Popular Culture,” in Punishment in Popular Culture, ed. Charles Ogletree Jr. and Austin Sarat (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 161-96.

[50] Recognition of the pain of working-class white dispossession (let alone that of racial minorities) was not, in the neoliberal political culture of the 1980s and 1990s, readily available from the state or the culture. Indeed, some have argued that the readiness of Americans to identify with crime victims and support them financially and symbolically was in part a way of safely expressing a desire to be protected and taken care of that was no longer culturally acceptable in the realm of economic policy. See, e.g., Lancaster, Sex Panic. Here a bizarre inversion of that theme plays out: the condemned gains recognition as a penitent criminal rather than an aggrieved victim.

[51] Austin Sarat, When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 225.

[52] Caryl Chessman, Trial by Ordeal (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1955), 92, quoted in Theodore Hamm, Rebel and a Cause: Caryl Chessman and the Politics of the Death Penalty in Postwar California, 1948-1974 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 68.

[53] Goldman and Reese, Chamber.

[54] Rather than calling attention to the foundational nature of racism in America, the film further consigns it to the hearts of elite white supremacists who will, the audience learns, be vanquished by the law.

[55] Goldman and Reese, Chamber.

[56] Ibid.

[57] Goodman, “Getting to Know Grandpa under Penalty of Death.”

[58] Before Furman, in the years 1961-70, Hugo Adam Bedau found a death sentence to clemency ratio of 6.3:1. After Gregg, from 1979 to 1988, he found that ratio had increased dramatically, to 40.2:1. The data, Bedau notes, do not account for potential, unknown differences between the numbers of applications for clemency during these two periods. Hugo Adam Bedau, “The Decline of Executive Clemency in Capital Cases,” New York University Review of Law and Social Change 18 (1990-91): 255-72.

[59] Harold G. Grasmick, Elizabeth Davenport, Mitchell B. Chamlin, and Robert J. Bursik Jr., “Protestant Fundamentalism and the Retributive Doctrine of Punishment,” Criminology 30 (1992): 21-46.

[60] “This is not the same person who committed those heinous crimes. Why? Because Carla Fay Tucker has given her heart and life to the Lord Jesus Christ and He is the only person who can change and turn people’s lives around,” a supporter wrote. Bruce Alexander to Ann Richards, n.d., General Counsel’s Execution Files, Texas Governor George W. Bush, Archives and Information Services Division, Texas State Library and Archives Commission (Austin, TX), box 2002/151-97. In Texas the governor does not have the authority to grant clemency without the recommendation of a clemency board. The Texas Board of Pardons had not recommended clemency for Tucker when these letters were written (and they did not do so when she was eventually put to death in 1998).

[61] Teresa Malcolm, “Tucker’s Death Affected Robertson Views,” National Catholic Reporter, April 23, 1999. His comments were echoed in an editorial published that year in Christianity Today in which the magazine’s editorial staff guardedly came out in opposition to the death penalty, noting that it was applied unequally to minorities and that it did not seem to be making the country safer. Unsigned editorial, “The Lesson of Karla Faye Tucker: Evangelical Instincts against Her Execution Were Right, but Not Because She Was a Christian,” Christianity Today, April 6, 1998.

[62] Kimberly Sevcik, “Has Stanley Williams Left the Gang?” New York Times Magazine, August 10, 2003.

[63] Arnold Schwarzenegger, “Statement of Decision: Request for Clemency by Stanley Williams,” December 12, 2005. Available at http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/Williams_Clemency_Decision.pdf (accessed July 27, 2015).

[64] On the efforts to save Tucker’s life, Gregory Curtis wrote, “No matter how the laws read, executing a woman is an act that offends some deep value we have held in Texas from 1863 until now. Our reluctance must be the most visible vestige of the belief that it is, after all, worse to hurt a woman than to hurt a man, that somehow the whole point of civilization is to protect women. . . . Yet, this view—unstated, uncodified in law, but persistent and powerful—is directly counter to current thinking. In all the debate over the death penalty, no one argues publicly that if there is a death penalty, it should apply only to men and not to women. The whole tenor of the times is to treat women and men the same. But does that belief extend even to the execution chamber?” Gregory Curtis, “Seven Women,” Texas Monthly, October 1997.

[65] Robyn E. Blumer, “Equality, Even in Death,” St. Petersburg (FL) Times, January 11, 1998.

[66] Sam Howe Verhovek, “As Woman’s Execution Nears, Texas Squirms,” New York Times, January 1, 1998.

[67] Darabont, Green Mile.

[68] Linda Ross Meyer, “The Meaning of Death: Last Words, Last Meals,” in Who Deserves to Die: Constructing the Executable Subject, ed. Austin Sarat and Karl Shoemaker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), 178.

[69] Panetti v. Quarterman 551 U.S. 930 (2007) at 958.