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The Ironies of Helping: Social Interventions and Executable Subjects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Kerry Dunn  and
Paul J. Kaplan
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Abstract

Law and society scholars have theorized about the link between capital punishment and the hegemony of individualism, but few offer empirical investigations to illustrate how individualism makes capital punishment possible (and vice versa) in the contemporary United States. In order to fill this gap, we analyze the legal and human service records that were compiled in the construction of one executable subject, Daniel Farnsworth. Using a critical discourse approach, we look at what was said and not said about Daniel in the records created by various helping agencies. In our analysis, we demonstrate how the helping agencies involved in Daniel's life repeatedly relied on an individuating psychological paradigm that led them to produce decontextualized catalogs of his actions and characteristics. Next, we illustrate how these pathologizing accounts were, ironically, later invoked in court in the name of preserving his life. Finally, we explain how “helping” discourses, along with the rules that regulate capital defense practice, straightjacket defense attorneys into reinforcing individualism in this context.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , June 2009 , pp. 337 - 368
Copyright
© 2009 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

Parts of this article were presented at the Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association in Montreal, Canada (2008). The authors would like to thank Benjamin Fleury-Steiner, Christopher Garces, Ritty Lukose, Carroll Seron, and the anonymous reviewers of the Law & Society Review for providing feedback on earlier versions of this article.

References

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