Mandatory Life and the Death of Equitable Discretion

Bowers, Josh

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1792792

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…The letters vary in length and the majority are handwritten, though a few are typed. While the participants are clearly a self‐selected group, there is a sufficient variety in terms of ethnic backgrounds (on the racialised application of LWOP, see Bowers ()), gender, age, and personal situation, to suggest that they represent a wide range of experiences.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Women Serving Life without the Possibility of Parole: The Different Meanings of Death as Punishment

Vannier

2016

Howard J Crime Justice

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This article draws on the written accounts of a self‐selected group of 48 women serving life without parole (LWOP) in California. In their testimonies, death takes on a symbolic form illustrated by the passing of time and the ‘mortification’ of the self (Goffman 1959, 1961). Their letters emphasise an embodied construction of death, provoked by ageing, illnesses, and medical neglect, as well as through the removal of motherhood and mothering. Through exploring the different, and nuanced, meanings ascribed to death by women serving LWOP, the article combats the cultural invisibility of this punishment and those who endure it.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Women Serving Life without the Possibility of Parole: The Different Meanings of Death as Punishment

Vannier

2016

Howard J Crime Justice

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“…These procedures provide what Josh Bowers calls an "express level for mercy." 43 In 1976, the Supreme Court ended capital punishment's brief moratorium when it judged these new procedures constitutional in Gregg v. Georgia.…”

Section: What Is Life Without the Possibility Of Parole?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“The State was Patiently Waiting for Me to Die”: Life without the Possibility of Parole as Punishment

Bennett

2020

Political Theory

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Despite its growing use over past decades, there has been relatively little public or scholarly discussion of life sentences that deny the possibility of parole. This essay outlines the labyrinthine legal and political developments that have rendered life imprisonment difficult to address—including the intertwined histories of the death penalty and civil death—and draws upon the life writing of those serving life to theorize a more distinct understanding of this punishment. Witnesses reveal how the possibility of life despite the impossibility of parole punishes by subverting the goals of human growth and development. The potentiality of what can be done in the present grinds up against the futility of what could have been done and what could be done were release an option. Considered alongside the laws and court opinions and claims that characterize its convoluted development, these testimonies reveal this punishment’s role in the American imagination. Life without the possibility of parole reinforces and relies upon a vision that not simply some people are unable to change, but that anyone in a democracy—no matter their position—is some steps away from irretrievable exclusion. Permanent confinement denies a restorative vision of democracy: any effort to abolish or amend it must include the voices of those imprisoned.

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“…It developed as mandatory (in most cases), with little to no space for consideration of mitigating factors (except for juveniles), no automatic review process, no procedural safeguards (regarding representation) and only a theoretical possibility of executive clemency (Henry ). There is no space for an ‘express lever of mercy’ fostered through due process on jury decision making and no ‘reasonable deliberation over equitable blameworthiness’ (Bowers , p.25). Unlike the death penalty, opportunities for revision through political deliberation (executive clemency) even though available in theory, are, in practice, virtually non‐existent, especially for cases involving murder (American Civil Liberties Union ).…”

Section: Death Penalty Exceptionalism and Lwop: Parallel Lives And Dementioning

confidence: 99%

Sites of Crossing and Death in Punishment: The Parallel Lives, Trade‐offs and Equivalencies of the Death Penalty and Life without Parole in the US

Girling

2016

Howard J Crime Justice

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This article explores continuities and discontinuities between two kinds of death in punishment: of death as punishment and of death as the specified detritus of punishment, life without parole (LWOP). It traces the parallel lives and equivalencies between life and death in penal policy and practice in the US, and attendant narratives of harshness/mildness, and compromises and covenants with pasts and futures. The discourse of death that has sustained the survival of the death penalty in the US has found a home in LWOP. It argues that spectacles and memorialisations of injustice, error and pain circumscribed in the judicial and popular discourse of death as different provide spaces for reflection on dignity and cruelty, spaces in which the loss of life and liberty can be grieved, a subversive politics of mourning (Butler 2004) for those whom punishment had deemed dispensable. As the death penalty is exchanged for LWOP, reform strategies need to reimagine and recapture these spaces for grieving, and understanding the death work of LWOP in US penal politics is crucial to this endeavour.

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Mandatory Life and the Death of Equitable Discretion

Cited by 6 publications

References 46 publications

Women Serving Life without the Possibility of Parole: The Different Meanings of Death as Punishment

Women Serving Life without the Possibility of Parole: The Different Meanings of Death as Punishment

“The State was Patiently Waiting for Me to Die”: Life without the Possibility of Parole as Punishment

Sites of Crossing and Death in Punishment: The Parallel Lives, Trade‐offs and Equivalencies of the Death Penalty and Life without Parole in the US

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