State Violence and the Execution of Law examines how law plays a fundamental role in enabling state violence and, specifically, specifically, torture, secret imprisonment, and killing-at-a-distance. Analysing the complex ways in which the U.S. government deploys law in order to consolidate and further colonial and imperial relations of power, Joseph Pugliese tracks the networks that enable the diffusion and normalisation of the state's monopoly of legitimate violence both in the U.S. and transnationally. He demonstrates how these networks of state violence are embedded within key legal institutions (US Department of Justice), military apparatuses (U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), civic sites (McCarran airport, Las Vegas), corporations (Boeing), carceral architectures (CIA Salt Pit, Kabul, and Guantánamo), and advanced technologies (unmanned aerial combat vehicles). Law's violence, it is maintained, is always preoccupied with the body: its torture, extortion or extermination. The exercise of state violence, it is argued, must be considered in situated locations that evidence the enmeshment of the body within geopolitical configurations of bio and necropower. For it is in these locations that law plays a foundational role in enabling and legitimising regimes of racialised violence. Drawing on poststructuralist, feminist, queer, critical legal, whiteness and anti-colonial theories, State Violence and Execution of Law brings into focus the contractual imbrication of the state with arms corporations and the contemporary military-industrial complex.

State Violence and the Execution of Law examines how law plays a fundamental role in enabling state violence and, specifically, torture, secret imprisonment, and killing-at-a-distance.

This book brings together scholarship on three different forms of state violence, examining each for what it can tell us about the conditions under which states use violence and the significance of violence to our understanding of states. This book calls into question the legitimacy of state uses of violence and mounts a sustained effort at interpretation, sense making, and critique. It suggests that condemning the state's decisions to use lethal force is not a simple matter of abolishing the death penalty or – to take another exemplary example of the killing state – demanding that the state engage only in just (publicly declared and justified) wars, pointing out that even such overt instances of lethal force are more elusive as targets of critique than one might think. Indeed, altering such decisions may do little to change the essential relationship of the state to violence.

Over 7,000 people have been legally executed in the United States this century, and over 3,000 men and women now sit on death rows across the country awaiting the same fate. Since the Supreme Court temporarily halted capital punishment in 1972, the death penalty has returned with a vengeance. Today there appears to be a widespread public consensus in favor of capital punishment and considerable political momentum to ensure that those sentenced to death are actually executed. Yet the death penalty remains troubling and controversial for many people. The Killing State: Capital Punishment in Law, Politics, and Culture explores what it means when the state kills and what it means for citizens to live in a killing state, helping us understand why America clings tenaciously to a punishment that has been abandoned by every other industrialized democracy. Edited by a leading figure in socio-legal studies, this book brings together the work of ten scholars, including recognized experts on the death penalty and noted scholars writing about it for the first time. Focused more on theory than on advocacy, these bracing essays open up new questions for scholars and citizens: What is the relationship of the death penalty to the maintenance of political sovereignty? In what ways does the death penalty resemble and enable other forms of law's violence? How is capital punishment portrayed in popular culture? How does capital punishment express the new politics of crime, organize positions in the "culture war," and affect the structure of American values? This book is a timely examination of a vitally important topic: the impact of state killing on our law, our politics, and our cultural life.

Introduction -- John T. PARRY: Pain, Interrogation, and the Body: State Violence and the Law of Torture -- Fernando PURCELL: "Too Many Foreigners for My Taste": Law, Race and Ethnicity in California, 1848-1852 -- Shani D'CRUZE: Protection, Harm and Social Evil: The Age of Consent, c. 1885-c. 1940 -- Ruth A. MILLER: Sin, Scandal, and Disaster: Politics and Crime in Contemporary Turkey -- İştar GÖZAYD1N: Adding Injury To Injury: The Case of Rape and Prostitution in Turkey -- Dani FILC and Hadas ZIV: Exception as the Norm and the Fiction of Sovereignty: The Lack of the Right to Health Care in the Occupied Territories -- Alban BURKE: Mental Health Care During Apartheid in South Africa: An Illustration of How "Science" Can be Abused -- Rui ZHU: Schistosomiasis and Capital Marxism -- Elena A. BAYLIS: The Inevitable Impunity of Suicide Terrorists -- Douglas J. SYLVESTER: The Lessons of Nuremberg and the Trial of Saddam Hussein -- Kirsten AINLEY: Responsibility for Atrocity: Individual Criminal Agency and the International Criminal Court -- Roberto BUONAMANO: Humanity and Inhumanity: State Power and the Force of Law in the Prescription of Juridical Norms -- Vincent LUIZZI: New Balance, Evil, and the Scales of Justice -- Jody LYNEÉ MADEIRA: The Execution as Sacrifice -- Bram IEVEN: Legitimacy and Violence: On the Relation between Law and Justice According to Rawls and Derrida -- Notes on Contributors.

For years, American states have tinkered with the machinery of death, seeking to align capital punishment with evolving social standards and public will. Against this backdrop, North Carolina had long stood out as a prolific executioner with harsh mandatory sentencing statutes. But as the state sought to remake its image as modern and business-progressive in the early twentieth century, the question of execution preoccupied lawmakers, reformers, and state boosters alike. In this book, Seth Kotch recounts the history of the death penalty in North Carolina from its colonial origins to the present. He tracks the attempts to reform and sanitize the administration of death in a state as dedicated to its image as it was to rigid racial hierarchies. Through this lens, Lethal State helps explain not only Americans' deep and growing uncertainty about the death penalty but also their commitment to it. Kotch argues that Jim Crow justice continued to reign in the guise of a modernizing, orderly state and offers essential insight into the relationship between race, violence, and power in North Carolina. The history of capital punishment in North Carolina, as in other states wrestling with similar issues, emerges as one of state-building through lethal punishment.

Brings together the work of writers to discuss the meaning of execution in American law and culture. This book provides historical background on the death penalty and brings together arguments about the morality of capital punishment with arguments about its meaning. It also considers whether death penalty is the very cause of violence.