NCJ Number
175390
Date Published
1997
Length
199 pages
Annotation
This volume examines five novels that each tell the story of a life that leads to capital punishment, with emphasis on the role of these works of fiction in the discourse that enables both capital punishment and the criminal justice system.
Abstract
These execution novels are "McTeague" by Frank Norris "An American Tragedy" by Theodore Dreiser, "Native Son" by Richard Wright, "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote, and "The Executioner's Song" by Norman Mailer. The discussion notes that the author of each novel has identified it with an actual capital murder case and purports to present a realistic, unbiased, and clinically accurate account of murder as a phenomenon. Each addresses a capital crime in which the murderer's identity is known and in which the central question is thus not guilt or innocence but criminal responsibility. The analysis places these novels against the historical background of crime and punishment in the United States, noting that the death penalty is not mandatory for specific crimes and that the strategy for execution is based more on distinctions between offenders than on distinctions between offenses. The discussion also notes that public discourse in crime in the United States is dominated by images of the electric chair, maximum-security prisons, and hardened convicts on parole and that these images both mirror and shape the exercise of punitive power. The author argues that such novels participate in the creation of myths that have a powerful but generally unacknowledged role in the correctional system and the sentencing of capital offenders and have helped promote the grown of a correctional system of unprecedented size in the modern world. Index and 99 references