Feminism and Punishment

Abstract

aria Faye Tucker's L t-menielt, made shortly before she was killed by the state of Texas in 1998, undercuts the liberal feminist argument that one can be opposed to the death penalty and yet continue to hold that so long as the death penalty is imposed, it should be imposed equally on men and women. However, the target of Tucker's statement was not feminism, as we will see, but the one person who held her life in his hands, Governor George W Bush. Tucker is making a case not for liberal equality before the law but against capital punishment, her own in particular. Neither is she calling the state's legitimacy into question; to my knowledge, interviews with Tucker did not disclose any explicitly political claim against the state or any political motivations for her crime. While her comments were not explicitly political, I suggest that they were strategically aimed at Bush in the final contest over Karla Faye Tucker's life. In these brief comments, I consider gender as it bears in the strategic contest over the life of the condemned. It is impossible here to fully defend either treating capital punishment as a strategic contest or treating the significance of gender only within that contest. However, it is enough, I think, to realize that capital punishment is a contest in which the condemned often believe they have a chance to win. Moreover, like both Renee Heberle and Timothy Kaufman-Osborn, I understand capital punishment to be a discretionary system of decisions, conflicts, contests, and trials. That means there is always a chance to intervene in the process leading up to death. The condemned are vying for their lives; that is why law books are worth fighting for on the inside.' From death row, Mumia AbuJamal explains that jailhouse lawyers make up the largest group in disciplinary units because they are capable of using the law to alter prison condi-