Summary Of Daniel Lachance's Executing Freedom

Throughout history, media has attempted to reflect the perceptions of social, political, and private issues through various mediums. One medium in particular, therefore, has been the law. The law is reflective of society, and society is reflected in the media. The larger social processes that occur in society tend to be reflected in whatever movies, television shows, and music is created. In Daniel LaChance’s book Executing Freedom, the reader gets a glimpse into how capital punishment and, specifically, the death penalty has caused people to change their perspective on the issue throughout United States history. Lachance organizes his argument by providing evidence as to how the legal consciousness of Americans is formed through the inherently
contradictory ideologies presented in the media. The persistent infiltration of primarily racist ideologies through the media shaped how the U.S. thought about capital punishment, and particularly, why many Americans continue to form a positive legal consciousness around the issue. The legal consciousness of an individual is formed throughout the span of their life, through personal experiences with the law, ways of learning about the law, and how they have seen the law work in society.
How people think about the law, how the laws affect themselves and the world around them is all a part of forming a legal consciousness. The formation of a legal consciousness is found in how people understand legal processes and hold views on legal issues based on how they have been previously treated with the law, used the law, or witnessed someone using the law. As a result, legal consciousness is a complex part of being a part of society where, in most cases, the law is at the top and everyone else is at the bottom. One of the most recent thought-provoking books on the issue of capital punishment in the U.S. is Daniel Lachance’s book that articulates key aspects regarding how society’s perspective on capital punishment has been influenced by a multitude of factors, including the role of the media. Lachance articulates several eras for movies and media consumption that held inherently positive views on capital punishment that whitewashed the reality of the death penalty in the
U.S. The whitewashing of the death penalty through movie production came about as an attempt to overcompensate the racial injustice and prejudice that continued to occur in America after the Civil War. In reality, African American men were far more likely to be sentenced to the death penalty than white men due to a racial bias. As a result, “All other factors being equal, they found that those convicted of killing whites were four times as likely to receive a death sentence as those convicted of killing nonwhites.
The murder of a black person had to be much more heinous than that of a white person for prosecutors to seek, and juries to impose, a death sentence” (Lachance, 106).
Understanding the awful discriminatory facts about the death penalty, Hollywood worked to make it seem like the racial bias of the death penalty was no longer present. The influence that Hollywood has not only on society but on how individuals grow and learn to think about the world is monstrous. Therefore, when Hollywood tried to produce movies with an explicit error in interpreting the role of capital punishment in society, people listened, they watched, and eventually, they believed. “Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, Hollywood films assured audiences that anti-black racism no longer infected the practice of capital punishment in the United States. State killing, they showed, was an act that primarily targeted white people and was carried out by racially diverse prison personnel” (Lachance,
107).
The whitewashing of the death penalty allowed U.S. citizens to believe that the death penalty was a fair and just punishment for all who deserved it, not simply those whose skin color fit the profile. Due to the persistent use of a racist ideology, white Americans managed to white-wash movies that denied how people of color, and particularly African Americans, were opted out of a narrative that was primarily theirs in the first place. People of color were sentenced to death row more than anyone else, and the media opted to forget that. How white Americans were shown in movies in relation to the death penalty then, gave Americans the perception that the death penalty was solely reserved for those that did something heinous enough to warrant the punishment. However, this was not the case, even after the attempts to overcompensate the racist nature of the support for the death penalty, people of color continued to be killed more than white people. The media’s role in this production of social thought allowed individuals to further promote the racist nature of the death penalty without understanding that it was contradictory to what was happening in the U.S. The contradictory nature of the ideologies surrounding the positive reinforcement of the death penalty both were misled in understanding the racist history and continued implementation of the death penalty, and, modified their typically Christian conservative beliefs through the influence of the media. Similar to Lachance’s argument, authors of The Common Place of Law, Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey understand how ideologies can be mobilized to the point where they are largely responsible for what is thought about in the world even if they are inherently contradictory. Ewick and Silbey argue, “Because meaning and sense making are dynamic, internal contradictions, oppositions, and gaps are not weaknesses or tears in the ideological cloth. On the contrary, an ideology is sustainable only through such internal contradictions. These contradictions become the bases for the invocations, reworking, applications, and transpositions through which structures (schemas and resources) are enacted in daily life. In short, contradictions and positions underwrite everyday ideological engagement, and thus ensure an ideology’s vitality and potency” (Ewick and Silbey, 226).
The inherent contradictions that the white, primarily Christian, middle class fed into have been mobilized by the use of something as powerful and popular as the media to shape their ideologies to uphold their place in power. It is not of the Christian faith to execute generous power towards killing people and or to not believe that sinners can be rescued and rehabilitated. Nonetheless, the demographic was targeted and successfully schemed into believing that what the media said about how the law should work was what they should believe. The implementation of the death penalty, therefore, has resulted in empowering white people to fight for their own safety and power, even if that means pretending that the punishment they support is just. The ideologies surrounding the death penalty were also a result of a bigger fight for negative freedom by the white middle class, “Consciously and unconsciously, racism had underlain the white middle class’s embrace of negative freedom and the way public policy built around it shifted the state’s power away from empowering the disadvantage and toward policing and punishing them” (Lachance, 17). To empower negative freedom or the freedom from the prohibition of one’s actions by the white middle class is what embodied the death penalty to be mobilized. Lachance continues to explain how, “They haunted the middle-class imagination, embodying an existential threat to the dominant culture that came from within it” (Lachance, 35). The white middle class was trained through their white supremacist history to stay in power even if that meant supporting something that inherently went against their religious beliefs and did not support justice. The public opinion on capital punishment was; therefore, shaped by what was shown in entertainment media. It is not to claim, however, that there is a causal relationship between the media and the use of the death penalty, but rather that the two are influenced by the range of legal consciousness of the public. It is not clear if there is a direct relationship between the media and capital punishment, but the media affects the legal consciousness of those thinking about capital punishment. Henceforth, people act upon their own legal consciousness to push their ideologies about a specific topic. The larger social pattern at work between the concepts of both authors represents how both the media and legal consciousness work together to form social thought that in return, can eventually become the law in the books. Lachance’s argument is not that the media directly caused the rise in support for the death penalty, but rather, how the influence of the media contributed to the manifestation of a legal consciousness that supported capital punishment. How individual legal consciousness is formed through events and prescribed ideologies given to the public to enforce a particular viewpoint is an underrated approach that should be given more attention. What happens in society seldom stems from an anomaly of thought or ideology, but rather, a carefully orchestrated inspiration of events executed to alter people’s beliefs to move them to a particular side. The role that the scope of the media and the development of legal consciousness played in the creation of inherently contradictory ideologies that continue to be held today, is a testament to the power of the relationship between the law and society. The law can be black and white, yet it moves in and through society like a plague that can only be altered through a new or additional ideological framework that pleases those in power.