Executing Freedom
Subtitle: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780226066691
Subjects: Capital punishment
Description: Daniel LaChance shows how attitudes toward the death penalty have reflected broader shifts in Americans’ thinking about the relationship between the individual and the state. Emerging from the height of 1970s disillusion, the simplicity and moral power of the death penalty became a potent symbol for many Americans of what government could do—and LaChance argues, fascinatingly, that it’s the very failure of capital punishment to live up to that mythology that could prove its eventual undoing in the United States.