
The eBooks we sell are sold as a single-user licence and are intended for the end user only.
The sale of some eBooks are restricted to certain countries. To alert you to such restrictions, please select the country of the billing address of your credit or debit card you wish to use for payment.
For further information see https://www.wildy.com/ebook-formats
Once the order is confirmed an e-mail will be sent to you to allow you to download the eBook. For UK purchases this will be automatic. For purchases outside the UK a member of staff will need to confirm the sale. (Staff are available to do this during normal business hours, Mon-Fri 8:30-17:00 UK time)
All eBooks are supplied firm sale and cannot be returned. If you believe there is a fault with your eBook then contact us on ebooks@wildy.com and we will help in resolving the issue. This does not affect your statutory rights.
Due to a technical issue some ebooks are not available to order.
Capital punishment policies in the USA are almost always justified by an individualistic belief in either rational choice or dispositional attribution, which justifies the death penalty either as a deterrent, or for retributive or incapacitative purposes. This book takes an in-depth look at the mitigation process and the use of individualism in the capital sentencing process. The work examines the use of individualistic (hegemonic) and contextualizing (subversive) discourses in the mitigation cases presented by capital defense attorneys and experts from trials in Delaware, and how these discourses were understood, interpreted, and utilized by jurors who served on those trials and by the judges who imposed the final sentences.
This in-depth sociological examination of the use of individualizing and contextualizing accounts throughout the entire mitigation process helps to illuminate the challenges involved in structuring a death penalty that is not arbitrary in a culture that is overwhelmed by individualizing discourses, and thus struggles to account for the entrenched racial and economic inequality that is so conducive to lethal violence. In conclusion, it questions the entire premise of the Supreme Court's jurisprudence of death, which rests on a belief that the discretion of decision makers can be 'guided' in a way that accounts for contextualizing evidence and will reduce the death penalty's arbitrary and discriminatory application.