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I'm not going to struggle physically against any restraints. I'm not going to shout, use profanity or make idle threats. Understand though that I'm not only upset, but I'm saddened by what is happening here tonight .... If someone tried to dispose of everyone here for participating in this killing, I'd scream a resounding, "No." I'd tell them to give them all the gift that they would not give me, and that's to give them all a second chance .... There are a lot of men like me on death row - good men - who fell to the same misguided emotions, but may not have recovered as I have. Give those men a chance to do what's right. Give them a chance to undo their wrongs. A lot of them want to fix the mess they started, but don't know how .... No one wins tonight. No one gets closure.
- Napoleon Beazley1
There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.
- Albert Camus2
Like it or not, you are putting on a show.
-John Whitley3
Show, spectacle, theatre, these representational media are central to the rituals of state killing.
- Austin Sarat4
In 1975 Michel Foucault published Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, a landmark book that opened with two astonishing chapters, "The Body of the Condemned" and "The Spectacle of the Scaffold," harrowing accounts in gruesome detail of the performance of capital punishment in the premodern era.5 These chapters served as points of departure for charting the historical shift from the dramatic infliction of corporal and capital punishment to modernity's more subtle and insidious infiltrations of power through mechanisms of discipline linked with knowledge. Punishment transformed, Foucault argued, from a theatre of violence and repression to a medical model of rehabilitation metonymically connected to other normalizing mechanisms and internalized techniques of coercion, compliance, and surveillance. According to Foucault, the performance of power in modern society has changed radically from spectacular capital punishments - that point at which the violence of the state is most nakedly displayed - to undercover capillary penetrations, insinuations, secretions, and circulations of power that is difficult to flesh out. He closed the book with...