Can Capital Punishment Survive If Black Lives Matter?

Drawing upon empirical studies of racial discrimination, the Movement for Black Lives platform calls for the abolition of capital punishment. The authors defend the Movement’s claim that the death penalty in the United States is a “racist practice” that “devalues Black lives.” They first sketch the jurisprudential history of race and capital punishment in the United States, wherein courts have occasionally expressed worries about racial injustice but have usually called for reform rather than abolition. They argue that the racial discrimination at issue flows in part from implicit biases concerning race, criminality, and violence, which do not fit comfortably within the picture of racial bias advanced by the courts. The case for abolition rests on Black Americans as a class (not merely those who interact with the criminal justice system as capital defendants or as murder victims) being subject to such bias and thereby not being accorded equal status under the law.

Rethinking Older Adult Murder Victims: Looking Back at 25 Years of Homicide Studies to Inform Future Research Needs

Over the past 25 years, homicide researchers have largely ignored older adults. This pattern continues even in light of the ongoing demographic shift associated with the aging baby boomer generation. This article reflects on the current state of the literature and discusses areas in need of attention. Future research needs can be categorized into substantive and methodological issues. The insights gained by exploring these topics can generate nuanced explanations for fatal violence against older adults and support future evidence-based prevention policies.

Mord / Murder

This year’s issue of Limbus contains essays which deal with the subject of murder in highly diverse ways. These contributions include the perspectives of legal philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries, modern criminalistics, literary history and Marxist philosophy, among others. In literary history, murder cannot only drive a plot but also stimulate the soul, an anthropological mystery which is of particular interest for research into literary anthropology. Several of the contributions focus on the figure of the murderer, while others address the idea of women as murder victims. Furthermore, other essays examine both the ‘murder mystery literature’ of the post-war period and contemporary crime fiction. An essay which deals with the subject of ‘planetary murder’ using science fiction texts that focus on nuclear war completes the volume.

Race, Ethnicity, and the Functional Use of Religion When Faced with Imminent Death

This article uses religious coping theory to theorize about how and why race and ethnic groups on death row frame religious last statements at the moment of imminent death. Unique data (N = 269) drawn from death row inmates in Texas between December 1982 and April 2016 reveal uniformity in the dominance that black, white, and Hispanic inmates assign to relational forms of expressions that draw them closer to God and expressions that facilitate spiritual intimacy with others, over self-focused expressions that represent efforts to gain control over the imminent death experience or signal a transformed life. There is a hierarchy of preferred religious coping methods that changes for each group following the implementation of a new policy allowing the family and friends of murder victims (co-victims) to witness the execution of inmates. It is concluded that race and ethnic groups differ in the premium they place on preferred religious coping strategies when faced with imminent death, and a change in social context, such as the sudden presence of co-victims at executions, increases the religious content of last statements for all groups.

Forgiveness Work

Iran's criminal courts are notorious for meting out severe sentences—according to Amnesty International, the country has the world's highest rate of capital punishment per capita. Less known to outside observers, however, is the Iranian criminal code's recognition of forgiveness, where victims of violent crimes, or the families of murder victims, can request the state to forgo punishing the criminal. This book shows that in the Iranian justice system, forbearance is as much a right of victims as retribution. Drawing on extended interviews and first-hand observations of more than eighty murder trials, the book explores why some families of victims forgive perpetrators and how a wide array of individuals contribute to the fraught business of negotiating reconciliation. Based on Qur'anic principles, Iran's criminal codes encourage mercy and compel judicial officials to help parties reach a settlement. As no formal regulations exist to guide those involved, an informal cottage industry has grown around forgiveness advocacy. Interested parties—including attorneys, judges, social workers, the families of victims and perpetrators, and even performing artists—intervene in cases, drawing from such sources as scripture, ritual, and art to stir feelings of forgiveness. These actors forge new and sometimes conflicting strategies to secure forbearance, and some aim to reform social attitudes and laws on capital punishment. The book examines how an Islamic victim-centered approach to justice sheds light on the conditions of mercy.

Colombia

Even to experts, Colombia is one of the most confusing countries in the Americas. Its democratic tradition is among the richest and most long-standing in the hemisphere, with only eleven years of military rule during its 200 some years of independence. Except for the United States and Canada, Colombia has had the highest growth rate in the Americas over the last 75 years. It is widely seen as having some of the continent's best universities and deep intellectual traditions along with a dazzling array of fine and industrial arts and now globally-popular tropical music. But despite these admirable achievements, Colombia has also experienced what its Nobel laureate Gabriel García Marquez once called “a biblical holocaust” of human savagery. Along with the scourge of politically-motivated assassinations (averaging 30 per day in the 1990s) have been drug-related massacres, widespread disappearances, rapes and kidnappings, and even the signature defilement of murder victims. The relentless dynamics of the illegal drug industry raises a puzzling question: how did Colombia capture and control that enormously-lucrative industry and then leverage its status as America's No. 1 drug supplier into a $7 billion military partnership with the world's superpower? The answer to that question is something everyone needs to know. To unravel the enigma, Richard D. Mahoney links historical legacies with key periods in the post-World War II era and then sets forth overarching cultural features--land violence, the Church, race, the Spanish language, and magical culture-that run through Colombia’s history, distinguish its national experience, and fuel its unquenchable creativity.

‘See How the Blood is Settled in his Face’: Shakespeare’s Warwick – Fiction’s First Pathologist

The twenty-first century television detective drama often relies heavily on the forensic pathologist; analysing what they see and reaching a conclusion about the manner of death, not just the cause. This might include determining that a case that initially looks like natural causes is in fact murder. While this may involve toxicology reports and other modern methods of investigation, it might also include the state of the body; things like post-mortem lividity or marks such as scratches, or a lack of them. Using these sorts of indicators is not new; in fact Shakespeare was writing about them in the late sixteenth century in 2 Henry VI. In it, the Earl of Warwick describes the state of the body of the Duke of Gloucester who has reportedly died in his bed. Over the course of around twenty lines Warwick gives a detailed catalogue of the state of the body and why each sign indicates a violent, rather than peaceful, death. This paper looks at that description and relates it to other descriptions of murder victims in drama at the time, as well as to those investigated by twenty-first century television pathologists.

Perwersje archiwum

Perversions of the archive In the article, the author discusses the problematic status of an archival document,taking into account the concepts of perverse historiography and the methodological indicators of the apartheid archive. Documents stored in IPN (Institute of National Remembrance) have been used to show the challenges faced by the people investigating the documents stored there and attempting to unify the material found in the archive. The analysis of Autor Solaris, a 2016 biographical documentary film about Stanisław Lem, is preceded by reflections on the involvement of the archive researchers in politics and their reproductions of clichés and stereotypes about the past, which the author sees as directly leading to blurring and erasing of the victims’ testimonies. In doing so, the author uses critical analyses of the pornographic aspects of the presentation of mass murder victims. Relating to a concept proposed by one of the critics indicating that using archival sources in modern art leads to a mass amnesia, the author points to the dangers of using Nazi propaganda films in contemporary documentary film.