Search results

A review essay on books by (1) Robert Johnson, Death Work: A Study of the Modern Execution Process (Belmont, CA: West/Wadsworth, 1998 [1990]); & (2) Stephen Trombley, The Execution Protocol (London: Century, 1993), which examine the institutional aspects of executions in the US. Johnson presents a thorough qualitative analysis of the contemporary execution process, drawing on interviews with death row officers to uncover the human emotions behind the daily routine of the extended waiting periods & ritualistic execution days. He also analyzes the role, compulsions, & emotional turmoil of the executioners in the bureaucratic procedure behind executions. Trombley offers a historical analysis of the US execution industry, focusing on the labor, technology, & scientific management involved in the process, seeking to understand the connection between mass production, technological progress, & institutionalized killing. Like Johnson, he analyzes how the horrific act of killing can be made routine through redundancy, technology, & the bureaucratic dispensation of roles. D. Bajo

Latest issue consulted: 2002. ; Contains procedural and contact information for all states (including D.C. and P.R.) and request forms for some. ; Description based on: 1992. ; Mode of access: Internet.

"For more than 30 years, involving more than 1,000 cases, Doyle Burke has been a death investigator, first with the Dayton, Ohio police department, then with a county coroner's office. In this book, he shares his tricks of the trade: how detectives solve cases, what they look for, the importance of forensic science, and the irreplaceable value of instinct. Along the way, Burke offers humorous trial anecdotes, thoughts on race and policing, stories about the fatal toll stress took on fellow officers, and, perhaps most movingly, details about the three fatal shootings of police officers – one of them one of his first friends on the department, another the son of his sergeant – that he had to investigate. Part memoir, part police procedural, and part true crime anthology, Death as a Living reveals the inside world of homicide and death investigation―the triumph, tragedy, humor, and truly bizarre situations one finds when working that beat." - back cover

In August 1942, an internal Sicherheitsdienst (SD) memorandum raised concerns surrounding the media currently circulating in Germany about its Asian ally: "The previous view, that the German soldier is the best in the world, has become somewhat confused by descriptions of the Japanese swimmers who removed mines laid outside Hong Kong, or of the death-defying Japanese pilots who swooped down upon enemy ships with their bombs. This has resulted in something a bit like an inferiority complex. The Japanese look like a kind of 'Super-Teuton' [Germane im Quadrat]." In its anxiety that the German public might be taking the wrong lessons from the incessant drumbeat of positive news coverage around Japan's string of victories in the winter of 1941–1942, this statement speaks to the ambivalent position of the Japanese within Nazi propaganda. On the one hand, these images of Japanese self-sacrificial loyalty to the nation reaffirmed the patterns of behavior and thought commonly valorized in the Nazi regime's captive media. At the same time, the reality that it was the Japanese—and not the Germans themselves—performing these feats of valor raised the comparison that the author found so demoralizing, and potentially even destabilizing. Nevertheless, despite the author's reservations, the conclusion was that this media's benefits outweighed the political risks because of its utility in highlighting the "inner weaknesses of Europe" for those elements of the German public still skeptical of National Socialism. In effect, the memorandum conceded, images of Japanese heroism could be persuasive as propaganda because they revealed the weakness and corruption endemic to Western modernity by contrast, which in turn affirmed the Nazi regime's decision to stake its future on a utopian "counter-modernity" framed around a synthesis of völkisch cultural authenticity and technological modernism.