Spring 1997, Volume XII, Number 2 The Death Penalty The Death Penalty: A Scholarly Forum Editor: Why has the death penalty attracted so much scholarly attention from such a wide variety of disciplines? Austin Sarat (Amherst College/Department of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought): I'm not so sure how broad the disciplinary representation in study of the death penalty is, but I have the sense that death penalty research has often been quite narrow in its focus. As Zimring pointed out in the Law & Society Review in 1993, most death penalty research is advocacy or policy oriented. That work is important, but I think it is also important to connect work on the death penalty to broader questions about the nature of law, the connection between law and violence, and the cultural meaning and significance of punishment. Leigh Bienen (Northwestern University/Law School): The persistence and pervasiveness of the general philosophical interest in punishment, retribution, evil, and justice means that the discourse often seems to be very broad, but that discourse is frequently very superficial, repeating the same old cliches on both side. Then there is the whole tradition of counting: counting the number of people on death row, the number of executions, the time between executions, etc. We count because we are looking for patterns and try to understand what is happening. The death penalty has attracted so much attention from scholars, but also from the public, the popular press, and popular culture because it directly implicates death and dying. Since the death penalty necessarily involves juries, judges, courts, statutes, the United States Congress, state legislatures, and other institutions of legal interpretation and authority, it is surprising there is not more discussion of the death penalty as a matter of public policy. James Acker (SUNY-Albany/School of Criminal Justice): No one discipline has a monopoly on the kinds of information or reasoning that can respond adequately. A law regulating this area would be soul-less without ethical underpinnings, rootless without history, mindless without empirical foundation, and otherwise lacking without the religious, political, psychological, and sociological dimensions that are associated with capital punishment. The death penalty attracts so much attention because it is about life and death, civil liberty and order, individual and state, crime and justice, race and power, evil and redemption, and other matters that are timeless and important. As scholars, we hope that our enthusiasm for the issues is tempered by scientific and other constraints that are supposed to form a part of scholarship, but I think it would be regrettable to attempt to dampen the zest that fuels at least some scholarship in this area. It is rewarding to participate in a quest for knowledge and a debate about policy that involve issues that really seem to matter. Dane Archer (University of California at Santa Cruz/Department of Sociology): In the case of the United States, at least, concern is no doubt spurred by the imminent prospect of thousands of executions. For the rest of the industrial world, the issue has scholarly appeal, but may lack some of the urgency generated by the issue here in the United States. Unlike all other democratic societies, the U.S. is re-embracing the death penalty as appropriate punishment and, indeed, we Americans are expanding the lists of offenses for which execution is merited. For many American scholars, the scientific curiosity involves the nature and merit of the kinds of evidence or other factors that apparently convince the general public that the death penalty is warranted, even as all other industrial nations embrace the abolition of this form of state killing. The death penalty therefore appears to be another example of "American exceptionalism." Leigh Bienen: There are many countries outside of western Europe -- e.g., China and other parts of Asia, where the government cheerfully executes people and there is no public policy debate. Not that there is much of a public policy debate in the U.S., for all the news items which appear on the media. I would argue that a good bit of the public and news interest in the death penalty is rather ghoulish, people's fascination with executions and death, and that little of what you see in the media is "discussion" or even a consideration of the public policy or legal issues. Shari Diamond (University of Illinois at Chicago/Department of Psychology): Researchers aren't very different from the general population, which used to turn out in large numbers for executions in the days of public hangings. When you couple that with the obvious horror of an irrevocable error, and the more modern concern with racial discrimination, it's hard to imagine a more compelling research topic. The imposition of the death penalty is still a relatively rare event, but we need only look to the huge research literature on the jury trial to recognize that low frequency generally does not deter the research community. The fascination with the jury may be due to the shadows it casts (a Marc Galanter image), and the same could be said for the death penalty. It speaks to philosophers and social scientists about the meaning of justice. Spring 1997 Issue Home | The Death Penalty: A Scholarly Forum Arbitrariness and the Death Penalty | Race and the Death Penalty Victims and the Death Penalty | Purposes of the Death Penalty Teaching about the Death Penalty | Conclusion and Participants List Unedited Death Penalty Forum ABA Calls for Moratorium | Policy, Statistics, and Public Opinion Multidisciplinary Teaching about the Death Penalty Links Focus on Law Studies Home | Subscribe to Focus | Questions/Ordering Back Issues