Tinkering with the Machinery of Death: The Body-as-Gauge in Discourses About Capital Punishment

"Nothing is so faulty as those laws which correct faults" (Bourdieu, 1997, p. 94). The execution of prisoners receives consistent criticism. Not only does the United States lock up more people than the rest of the known world, we also stand alone as the only member of the G8-the eight nation states with the highest national economy (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States)--to permit the execution of prisoners (Amnesty International, 2012). Approximately 3,100 of the people incarcerated await capital punishment, with less than 2% of capital offenders executed in 2011 (Snell, 2013). For the past 11 years the United States has experienced a downward trend with fewer people being sentenced to death and more and more states repealing their death penalty laws. Currently 18 states and the District of Columbia do not allow for capital punishment. Regardless of the downward trend both in the number of people incarcerated and executed, a significant number of people live behind bars-with a considerable number of them awaiting death. The reasons for criticism vary. Activists criticize racial discrimination in execution sentencing [Furman, 1972), as well as the execution of minors [Roper, 2005) and the mentally ill [Atkins, 2002). The possible execution of innocent persons also generates criticism, with the Innocence Project (2015) reporting 324 post-conviction DNA exonerations since the first one in 1989-20 of which involved persons sentenced to death. Recent developments have resulted in prisons unable to obtain drugs used to administer lethal injection, leading to renewed discussion about the viability of lethal injection as a method to facilitate death (Sanburn, 2013). The inability of prisons to obtain the drugs necessary for existing protocols has led to new protocols largely undisclosed and untested, and an increased number of "botched" executions (Goodwyn, 2015). Communication scholars Stephen Hartnett and Daniel Larson (2006) conclude "seeking the death penalty plays a corrosive role within the US justice system" (p. 268), Fordham University law professor Deborah Denno characterizes the state of capital punishment as in "absolute chaos" (Levitt & Feyerick, 2013), and Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel finds the practice "completely broken" (Volz, 2013). Within the context of global and domestic pressure to end the practice of capital punishment, argumentation scholars are invited to ask: How is the practice of capital punishment justified in a developed, democratic system? What logical purpose does capital punishment serve? What symbolic action does capital punishment perform in a governmental system that celebrates rhetorical practice by basing so many of its governmental systems upon the deliberative processes (e.g., through election campaigning, legislative debates, and trials and appeals) and unobstructed channels for speech and expression? This essay argues that the metaphor body-as-gauge guides capital punishment discourse, from advocates who protest the death penalty to the protocols employed to administer the punishment and from the government that enacts the penalty to appellate judicial opinions that determine its constitutionality. The body-as-gauge provides auditors an instrument through which to evaluate how pain and suffering are processed through the corporeal form of the accused. The body-as-gauge does not deter crime; the body-as-gauge evaluates method of punishment. Notable deaths demonstrate how, when the body-as-gauge reads suffering as high, the government abandons certain methods of punishment or hides the mechanisms of death. The sense of suffering read upon the bodily meter requires the judicial branch to consider the Eighth Amendment mandate that punishment not be cruel and unusual. Yet the body-as-gauge extends beyond the material borders of the accused to take up the question of how the body politic responds to different forms of execution. …