Regulating Death: Capital Punishment and the Late Liberal State

When Prisoners’ “Right to Die” Goes Online: A Case-Study of Legal and Penal Sensibilities

“…In invoking the electric chair, Lucia appears to imagine the prisoner in pain, in opposition to the humane death so important to the American state’s absolution of capital punishment (Garland 2011; Kaufman-Osborn 2001; Sarat 2001). The electric chair is a comparatively corporeal and spectacular reference.…”

“…The electric chair is a comparatively corporeal and spectacular reference. The electric chair’s violence has required US courts, in contexts of judicial review, to obscure and diminish signs that the prisoner suffered unnecessarily to preserve the method’s legitimacy (Kaufman-Osborn 2001) and necessitated additional means to “minimize the exposure of bodily fluids and flows” (Garland 2011, 778). Whether intentional or not, Lucia’s reference to the electric chair strongly associates MAiD with such gore.…”

“…Insights about law and the body have aided scholars like Sarat (2001) in attending to the sensibilities that shape punishment and the regulation of death. Following Robert Cover’s (1986, 1601) observation that “[l]egal interpretation plays on a field of pain and death,” Sarat (2001) and colleagues (e.g., Kaufman-Osborn 2001) argue pain, specifically the body in pain, is uniquely generative of sensibilities that sustain (or, potentially, challenge) different forms of state lethality. For example, the body in pain can be thought of as a record of state violence, whose existence can channel and magnify pleasure among those spectating and those invested in the continuation of these violent practices.…”

“…The presence of pain seems meaningful to such commenters “via its incorporation within a cosmological narrative,” as Timothy Kaufman-Osborn (2001, 78–79) describes it, with respect to the commenters’ proper place on earth: ordered, happy, and sovereign above an invasive and depraved Other. This is suggested by comments, like Beverly’s, that portray prisoners accessing MAiD outside the prison as a compromise to their duly deserved sentence: a “bending” and “changing” of punishment by allowing the prisoner Other to move outside the penitentiary among a non-criminal population.…”

“…The pain of prisoners is appropriated in these images as justice, which stands in contrast to law’s official narratives historically in Canada (Strange 2001) and presently in the US, according to which capital punishment fulfills “the sentimental ideal of death that involves no pain” (Kaufman-Osborn 2001, 80; also see LaChance 2017). It stands in contrast to the abolition of corporal punishment as a necessary part in a civilized and modern Canada (Strange 2001), even if punishment continues to be experienced corporeally (Chamberlen 2018; Garland 2011).…”