NCJ Number
204106
Journal
Punishment & Society Volume: 6 Issue: 1 Dated: January 2004 Pages: 67-84
Date Published
January 2004
Length
18 pages
Annotation
This article discusses how Latino Americans have been historically racialized in popular culture, key State legislative initiatives, and jurors’ death sentencing decisions.
Abstract
This study focused on cases involving Latino/a defendants, an ethnic group that has been relatively unexplored by death penalty scholars in the United States. Thirteen percent of the defendants executed in Texas, the premier killing State, were Latino Americans. Interviews were conducted with former capital sentencing jurors (from the Capital Jury Project) that have sentenced a Latino defendant to death in either Texas or California. To understand racialized discipline in capital sentencing, the focus should be on how the use of racial stereotypes confirm taken-for-granted, normalized understandings, or “what everyone knows.” The image of Latino Americans as “dangerous” and “immoral” goes back to the late 15th century. Columbus’s grossly inaccurate descriptions of early indigenous people as “fierce” and “immoral” served as seeds for the development of racialized stereotypes. The contemporary media serves as a disciplinary mechanism for keeping such racialized myths alive. California’s Proposition 187 mobilized White racialized fears of crime in 1994. The focus on “illegals” has been associated with that of the lawless criminal. Contemporary anti-immigration and "tough-on-crime" narratives of the "threatening alien" have direct implications for understanding how modern death sentencing decisions are racialized. Capital jurors impose the death sentence on a Latino defendant as part of a broader assimilationist-infused strategy for doing punishment. The "coloring" of Latino Americans in contemporary popular and political discourse is inextricably bound up in penal practice as taken-for-granted. Future research must pay greater attention to how historically situated hegemonic narratives permeate the penal apparatus in other sites. 1 table, 14 notes, 42 references