Final Judgments The Death Penalty in American Law and Culture

Final Judgments: The Death Penalty in American Law and Culture explores the significance and meaning of finality in capital cases. Questions addressed in this book include: how are concerns about finality reflected in the motivations and behavior of participants in the death penalty system? How does an awareness of finality shape the experience of the death penalty for those condemned to die as well as for capital punishment's public audience? What is the meaning of time in capital cases? What are the relative weights according to finality versus the need for error correction in legal and political debates? And, how does the meaning of finality differ in capital and non-capital (LWOP) cases? Each chapter examines the idea of finality as a legal, political, and cultural fact. Final Judgments deploys various theories and perspectives to explore the death penalty's finality.

Introduction: starting to think about finality in capital cases Austin Sarat; 1. Finality and the capital/non-capital punishment divide Carissa Byrne Hessick; 2. Following finality: why capital punishment is collapsing under its own weight Corinna Barrett Lain; 3. The time it takes to die and the 'death' of the death penalty: untimely meditations on the end of capital punishment in the United States Jennifer L. Culbert; 4. Grand finality: post-conviction prosecutors and capital punishment Daniel S. Medwed; 5. Existential finality: dark empathy, retribution, and the decline of capital punishment in the United States Daniel LaChance; Afterword: death and the state Jenny Carroll.

Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, and Associate Dean of the Faculty at Amherst College, Massachusetts, and Justice Hugo L. Black Senior Faculty Scholar at the University of Alabama School of Law. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including the recent A World without Privacy (2014), Civility, Legality, and Justice in America (2014), and Reimagining to Kill a Mockingbird: Family, Community, and the Possibility of Equal Justice under the Law (2013). His book When Government Breaks the Law: The Rule of Law and the Prosecution of the Bush Administration was named one of the best books of 2010 by The Huffington Post.