Book Review: Sarah Beth Kaufman, American Roulette: The Social Logic of Death Penalty Sentencing Trials
| Author | Hadar Aviram |
| Date | 01 January 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520949828 |
| Published date | 01 January 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book Reviews
Sarah Beth Kaufman, American Roulette: The Social Logic of Death Penalty
Sentencing Trials, University of California Press: Oakland, CA, 2020; 248
pp. (including index): 9780520344396, $29.95 (pbk)
Two opposite visions of the decision to impose capital punishment govern the American
psyche, even in this era of its slow demise: one values the death penalty for distinguishing
the “worst of the worst”by their heinous crimes and the other critiques it for crystalizing
race and class divides. Sarah Beth Kaufman’sAmerican Roulette offers a third path.
Relying on extensive ethnographic observations of 16 capital trials, spanning ten years
and encompassing various jurisdictions, Kaufman argues that “capital sentencing reflects
a legal system at the limit of its powers, locked into practices defined by adversary and
performance rather than justice or compassion”(p. 4). Characterized by theatricality that
transcripts fail to capture, capital trials’ostensible adherence to heightened due process
standards belies the arbitrary basis for life and death decisions: performative devices
such as “recruiting ‘punitive citizens’as jurors, narrating defendant’s childhoods, predict-
ing their future acts, and witnessing the mourning of victims’family and friends”which
“hold little value for separating the ‘worst’defendants from those who deserve mercy”
(pp. 186–187).
Kaufman’s chronology begins much earlier, with divergent murder solving rates in
different locations, and then with the arbitrary catalogue of aggravated homicides.
Then, prosecutors exercise discretion, opting for capital trials in “the most culturally per-
verse [cases], rather than those that might best serve crime control interests.”Relying on a
self-compiled database, Kaufman identifies four templates: (1) a young, poor African
American or Latino man committing homicide in public, e.g., in the course of a
robbery; (2) a poor man killing during a home invasion; (3) an older, poor, often white
man committing a sexual act in conjunction with a murder; or (4) murder of intimate
family members.
After describing the peculiar conventions of the Bordieuan “field”of capital litigation
(defense teams, resource centers, capital prosecutor organizations), Kaufman explains its
characteristic performativity: prosecutors and victim supporters, seeking to uphold tradi-
tion (and judges, albeit to a lesser degree), as well as defense attorneys and defendant sup-
porters, seeking to deviate from tradition, perform a piece of interpretive art—
stage-setting, narrative reconstruction, storytelling, and emotional manipulation—to the
jury. The capital jury selection process produces an audience of “punitive citizens”
Punishment & Society
2022, Vol. 24(1) 136–148
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474520949828
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