Charles J Ogletree, Jr and Austin Sarat (eds), Life without Parole: America’s New Death Penalty?
| Author | Natalie Pifer |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474513493902 |
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Achieving any of these three objectives would be a triumph, and the fact that
Bonnycastle has achieved all three makes her work so valuable.
Danielle Arlanda Harris
San Jose
´State University, USA
Charles J Ogletree, Jr and Austin Sarat (eds), Life without Parole: America’s New Death Penalty?,
New York University Press: New York, 2012; 352 pp.: 9780814762486, $79.00 (cloth), $26.00
(pbk)
While the rallying cry ‘death is different’ has long helped to focus US attention on
capital punishment, Charles J. Ogletree, Jr and Austin Sarat challenge this funda-
mental concept. Life, they suggest, is perhaps not so different from death, yet life
without parole sentences (LWOP) have received little critical academic attention.
In an edited volume considering a ‘punitive pecking order’ (p. 20) topped by
LWOP, legal and interdisciplinary scholars confront LWOP’s inconsistent theor-
etical and practical justifications, its multiple meanings, and its significant injustices
while beginning to conceptualize possible reforms.
Though the volume centers on LWOP, death lurks in the shadows as a constant
point of comparison such that sometimes it seems life is best understood in relation
to death. The parallel is intentional and unsurprising. After all, LWOP proliferated
through a strategic partnership between ‘death penalty abolitionists and tough-on-
crime politicians’ (p. 2) that offered LWOP in death’s place. Moreover, the volume
illustrates the commonalities between these two types of sentences – highlighting
LWOP’s racial disparity, shaky theoretical penal justifications, and the Supreme
Court’s use of an Eighth Amendment analysis in 2010’s Graham v. Florida (cat-
egorically exempting juvenile, non-homicide offenders from LWOP) traditionally
reserved for capital punishment. However, LWOP is also different from a death
sentence. As the introduction concludes, ‘LWOP may well be the new capital pun-
ishment, with all of its baggage – but none of its processes’ (p. 21). The lens offered
by the inextricable relationship of life to death produces insights that both chal-
lenge and reaffirm the understanding that death is different.
For example, Sharon Dolovich argues that those sentenced to LWOP exist in
Agamben’s ‘state of exception’, permanently excluded from society ‘in spite of the
possibility of change’ (pp. 122–123). Implicitly challenging analysis that considers
the executable subject inhuman (Sarat and Shoemaker, 2011), Dolovich argues that
both the procedural and symbolic aspects of a death sentence reflect humanity
where LWOP reflects Agamben’s bare life – those so sentenced are excluded and
forgotten. Former federal prosecutor Bennett Capers also highlights LWOP as
death’s forgotten alternative, recounting that though he remembers each capital
defendant, he has ‘trouble remembering even one of my LWOP defendants’
(p. 168). Capers likewise characterizes the treatment of LWOP defendants as
less-than-human: ‘We prosecuted our LWOP defendants as if they were inter-
changeable widgets on an assembly line, and it was clear they were often defended
Book reviews 583
To continue reading
Request your trial