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Chapter 9 “A Fate Worse than Death” Reform, Abolition, and Life without Parole in Anti–Death Penalty Discourse Bryan J. McCann Over the past decade, citizens and public officials in the United States have begun to turn against the death penalty. The first indication that capital punishment may be reaching its twilight years came in 2003, when George Ryan, the Republican governor of Illinois, commuted every death sentence in his state following a moratorium and institutional review of his state’s deathpenalty apparatus. The findings convinced Ryan (2003) that “the Illinois capital punishment system is broken” (para. 110) due to its arbitrary application and a startling number of exonerations over several decades. In the years following Ryan’s controversial decision, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Illinois have abolished their death-penalty statutes (“New Mexico Gov.,” 2009; Richburg , 2007; Scott, 2008; Stern, 2011). Many other states recognize that the death penalty has no demonstrative deterrent impact on crime and is a money pit of public policy. For example, California, which houses the nation’s largest death row, spends approximately $250 million for every execution. Texas, the state that executes more inmates than any other, spends three times the cost of a life sentence for every death-penalty case (“Facts about the Death Penalty,” 2008; “Switching Off the Death Penalty,” 2010). In a particularly damning gesture for state-sanctioned killing, the American Law Institute (ALI), whose 1962 Model Penal Code functioned as the intellectual framework for performing executions in America, abandoned its own standards “in light of the current intractable and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment” (Liptak, 2010a, para. 7). Abolitionist William McAuliffe commented that the ALI’s gesture is “a recognition and a furtherance of a shift in the culture” of American criminal justice, in which a prestigious legal body has now made clear “they don’t want to have a role in legitimizing the use of the death penalty” (Hoppe, 2010, para. 6). In the spring 2007 edition of her organization’s newsletter, National Coalition to Abolish 188 Bryan J. McCann the Death Penalty (NCADP) executive director Diann Rust-Tierney declared, “Quietly but definitively, brick by brick, the foundation of the death penalty system is crumbling across the country” (“A Welcome Trend,” 2007). Even in the domain of public opinion, abolitionists have cause to be optimistic . According to the most recent Gallup poll on the death penalty, 65 percent of American respondents supported capital punishment; this is far lower than the peak years of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when support reached a staggering 80 percent. Furthermore, in 2006, respondents were more likely to support life imprisonment without the possibility of parole (henceforth, LWOP) than execution when given a choice between the two (Newport, 2009). It is this final statistic that propels the argument of this chapter. In a widely read and influential essay on the death penalty and public opinion, executive director Richard Dieter (1993) of the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) argued, “The public wants to be sure that murderers will not, in fact, be released after a few years and that the families of victims are compensated for their tragedy. As these ingredients become standard in the country’s sentencing schemes, the death penalty may once again become a minority position in this country” (Dieter, 1993, para. 111). In other words, Dieter saw in the growing prevalence of LWOP an opportunity to have his abolitionist cake and eat it, too: Americans need not do the grisly work of executing the most dangerous criminals to remain confident that the criminal-justice system will prevent such individuals from doing harm again. In this chapter, I draw from literature theorizing the death penalty’s place in the prison-industrial complex, rhetoric of anti–death penalty activists, and my own experience as a grassroots abolitionist organizer to critique the prevalence of LWOP in the death-penalty abolitionist movement. Specifically, I argue that while the alternative of LWOP serves as an understandable rhetorical strategy to spread the anti–death penalty gospel to more ambivalent audiences, it undermines what I believe should be a central organizational posture of the abolitionist cause: understanding capital punishment as only the most macabre expression of a colossal and broken prison-industrial complex . Far too many anti–death penalty activists partake in what I am calling a corporeal myopia that emphasizes the body of the condemned rather than its location within the prison-industrial complex as a whole...

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