The Death Penalty, Volume I
by jacques derrida
translated by peggy kamuf
university of chicago, 312 pages, $38

The Death Penalty, Volume II
by jacques derrida
translated by elizabeth rottenberg
university of chicago, 304 pages, $45

Courting Death:
The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment

by carol s. steiker and jordan m. steiker
belknap, 400 pages, $29.95

By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed:
A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment

by edward feser and joseph m. bessette
ignatius, 424 pages, $24.95

Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism:
Considered in Their Fundamental Principles

by juan donoso cortés
preserving christian publications, 336 pages, $16

Sovereign states, all of them, kill people. That is, they authorize their agents and representatives to kill, sometimes judicially and sometimes by extralegal command, sometimes at home and sometimes abroad. Abroad, they do it most often and with the highest body count in war or warlike conditions, where soldiers are the principal agents. They also, sometimes, outside the condition of war, assassinate foreign nationals and their own citizens. At home, sovereign states kill by the use of police power. States also permit citizens to kill (self-defense, abortion, euthanasia) without directly licensing or requiring them to do so. And lastly, some sovereign states kill at home by judicially deliberated execution, in which courts find a citizen guilty of an offense to which the penalty of death is attached, prescribe that penalty, and depute agents to carry it out.

Judicial execution (or, as it is sometimes called, the death penalty or capital punishment), in every sovereign state that practices it, produces many fewer corpses than does any other kind of state killing. That’s certainly true in the U.S., where the mean annual number of judicial executions from 1997 to 2016 is roughly fifty-four. Worldwide, 1,032 judicial executions were recorded in 2016, in twenty-three countries. The real number is much higher because that number doesn’t include executions performed by China, which refuses to provide figures. But still, the number is unlikely to exceed three or four thousand for the year. These numbers, compared to deaths caused by police killings, military actions, or abortions, are vanishingly small. In the U.S., the yearly mean number of judicial executions over the last few decades tracks closely with the yearly mean number of deaths from lightning strikes.

The attention given to judicial execution, however, is altogether disproportionate to the body count. Every year, at every level of culture, there’s a flood of words about it, from abstruse, high-theoretical juridical and philosophical arguments to close-to-the-ground rants and breast-beatings. There are protests and vigils and marches on every side. Why this mismatch? The fundamental reason is that judicial execution, unlike any other state action, unlike even other kinds of state killing, dramatizes, always with theatricality, the question of sovereignty. The sovereign state, even the constitutional democracy that’s supposed to recognize and strive to support the inalienable rights of its citizens, nonetheless holds the power to kill its citizens with direct intent and thereby to alienate from them an essential right, which is to continue living. Judicial execution shows this state of affairs dramatically, and so it focuses political interest and concern as nothing else can. Should the sovereign state be able to do this to its citizens? If it should, why? How, if it may be done, should it be done? What effects, other than the killing in which it consists, does judicial execution have, and how may they be assessed? And so on. These questions are themselves politically theatrical and are about political theater: What you think about them serves as a marker of your place on the political stage. Whence the flood of words, to which I’m here adding.

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