Life-with-Hope Sentencing: The Argument for Replacing Life-Without-Parole Sentences with Presumptive Life Sentences

Sites of Crossing and Death in Punishment: The Parallel Lives, Trade‐offs and Equivalencies of the Death Penalty and Life without Parole in the US

“…The ‘historical thoughtlessness’ of the adoption of LWOP since the 1980s (Berry , pp.6–7) is in sharp contrast to the increased judicial and activist scrutiny of capital sentencing of the ‘death is different’ doctrine which drove executions to an effective standstill around the same time. This disparity provided both practical and symbolic incentives to individual states, criminal actors, and jurors, to consider and replace LWOP as alternatives to death sentences.…”

“…The study of the ‘cultural life’ of capital punishment (Sarat and Boulanger ; Girling ; Seal ) is very much premised on the witnessing of its judicial, political, administrative, and medicalised rituals (Sarat ; Lynch ; Girling ; Kaufman‐Osborn ). Yet such witnessing is absent in the attendant practices of LWOP and the very condition of invisibility or ‘thoughtlessness’ (Berry ) is built into the history of emergence and grammar of LWOP as an alternative to a death sentence. This article explores possibilities and impasses of witnessing (seeing and seeing through) a new scene of death in punishment in the context of the political and cultural condition of invisibility of death in ordinary, banal, normalised carceral punishment, for the worst of the worst.…”