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This article has two goals. First, I demonstrate the challenges that "humanization" poses for the defense as an ideal of sentencing mitigation in U.S. capital trials. Capital case procedure largely neutralizes the sympathetic effects of humanization with jurors. In addition, potential mitigation witnesses inhabit affective environs that undermine any inclination to help the defense through sympathetic testimony. Second, I explain how defense advocacy responds to humanization's challenges. Practitioners adopt an investigative mindset that focuses on forging the conditions to cultivate relationships with mitigation witnesses. This intensive affective labor translates back into the realm of procedure through strategic maneuvers intended to avoid trial and the performance of humanization.

This chapter explores knowledge practices around the subject of capital punishment. Capital sentencing jurisprudence and certain strands of academic scholarship on the death penalty have certain resonances with recent developments in reflexive cultural anthropology. Using the notion of productive unraveling, this chapter seeks to reinforce relations between these various knowledge practices by conceiving of them as situated on the same ground, already interwoven with one another. This chapter presents itself as both an example of and a call for the development of interconnections between these various kinds of expert knowledges concerning the death penalty. [Copyright 2007 Elsevier Ltd.]