Capital punishment as moral imperative

Abstract

Capital punishment plays a contradictory, emotional role in American social and political culture. In particular, the relationship between this punishment and variously situated social actors suggests a complexity to contemporary penality that is not fully addressed by macro-level examinations of state punishment. In this article, I explore one venue where this relationship is evident: among pro-death penalty communications on the Internet. I examine these messages in part because they seem to reveal, rather explicitly, the affective, symbolic nature of popular support for capital punishment in the USA. I suggest that the death penalty becomes an unproblematic, indeed, preferred method and symbol of justice in this venue through a discursive process which reduces the underlying social issues to a battle between good (i.e. the innocent victims) and evil (i.e. capital murderers). Once so reduced, no costs of capital punishment can outweigh the justice achieved by state executions in the rhetoric of pro-death activists and pundits. Ultimately these communications reveal a set of sensibilities about crime and punishment which seem to long for a detour from the civilizing path, in that the communicators seek to deny any interdependencies or empathies with those who commit violent crime, while working to unleash punishment from its institutional restraints.