Constructing the Deviant: Capital Sentencing Courtrooms as Sites of Contested Knowledge In this project I conduct the first sustained ethnography of American capital sentencing. In doing so I ask: How are offenders' social histories used in capital sentencing? Are social histories deployed differently in different courtrooms? Are there differences in the ways in which prosecutors and defense teams use social histories? What sorts of bodies of knowledge are and are not used to construct social histories in capital courtrooms? Does variation in local culture shape these narratives? Does variation in the level of funding for indigent defense? To answer these questions, I will watch capital sentencing trials and read supplemental transcripts during the course of one year in two states that vary according to local culture and state funding for indigent defense.
Capital sentencing trials are an important site for ethnographic analysis for two reasons. First, capital sentencing provides a unique example of how offenders' social histories are used in the American criminal justice system to determine punishment. After most non-capital criminal convictions, an offender is sentenced by a judge according to state and federal guidelines, with relatively little or no account for the offender's social history. In order to sentence an offender to death however, the United States Supreme Court requires an examination of the offender's social history and a sentencing decision by a jury. In this "sentencing phase" a new round of evidence is presented to the jury by the prosecution and the defense to argue that the offender deserves death (prosecution) or life in prison (defense). As intended by the United States Supreme Court, the sentencing phase provides jurors with information about the "character and propensities of the offender," so that the offender's sentence be appropriate not only the crime, but to him as a person. For days, weeks, or months and to differing degrees of effectiveness depending on the relative skill and effort of the participants, prosecution and defense present a variety of evidence that they think will persuade jurors to link the defendant's biography or particular character to a lesser or greater punishment. By analyzing how capital defendants' social histories are constructed, we better evaluate whether and how social histories might be used in other arenas of criminal sentencing, taking into account the degree to which the presentation of offenders' social histories reflect variations in local context and/or the level of funding states dedicate to indigent defense.
Second, capital sentencing trials give us a multi-dimensional and unmediated site through which to study the interactive construction of deviance in contemporary discourse, thus contributing to the sociology of knowledge and performance. Unlike many studies of capital punishment, this project is not concerned primarily with the outcomes of capital trials. Instead it interrogates the discursive content of the contending narratives that constitute the trial: the ways in which prosecutors, defense attorneys, witnesses, judges and courtroom personnel construct and contest the character of the defendant. Deviance is most often studied in sites that are constrained by single voices, institutions, audiences, authors, or disciplines. Capital sentencing trials are variable, flexible, and cacophonous: any combination of physicians, friends and family of the defendant, survivors of the victim, psychiatrists, psychologists, statisticians, religious figures, prison guards, and others are called by both prosecution and defense. In addition, because this testimony is aimed at non-expert jurors, we can observe how expert knowledge from many fields is used to provide narratives for laypeople.
