“Regarding the Other Death Penalty”

The title of this post is the title of this relatively short piece just out in the Columbia Law Review Forum and authored by Kempis Songster, Terrell Carter & Rachel López.  Here is how it starts:

In his compelling new book, Invisible Atrocities, Professor Randle DeFalco explores the function of the aesthetics of violence in international law.  In particular, he questions international law’s preference for sanctioning spectacular demonstrations of violence rather than more banal, bureaucratic actions that cause massive scales of suffering and misery.  The book resonated with us because we’ve seen the same dynamic at work in U.S. criminal law with respect to society’s views on two forms of the death penalty: capital punishment and life without parole (LWOP).

Two of us, Kempis Songster and Terrell Carter (affectionately known as Ghani and Rell), intimately understand the invisibility of the harm DeFalco describes.  Our sentence — a sentence of life without parole — was sold by the anti–death penalty movement as the more humane alternative to capital punishment.  Yet, since our miserable state of existence serving life without parole tainted a word so full as “life,” we believe that this sentence “is more aptly called death by incarceration” (DBI).  Taking inspiration from DeFalco’s book, we aim to bring visibility to the slow but fatal violence of death by incarceration.