AN EXAMINATION of the RHETORIC of DEATH Zac
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
ABSTRACT: I’M READY, WARDEN: AN EXAMINATION OF THE RHETORIC OF DEATH Zac Wendler, Ph.D Department of English Northern Illinois University, 2015 John Schaeffer, Director This dissertation examines the rhetorical context, preservation, and dissemination of the final statements of American felons executed between 1985 and spring 2012, as well as the history of these items in the West generally and America specifically. This examination found little variance in final statement genre incidence rates with respect to ethnicity, gender, date of utterance, or any other temporal or demographic factor. As a result, it examines in detail the cultural context which stabilizes and centers this type of utterance and explores how such statements move through American society and are transformed in the process. It argues that such distortion is productive and both the result of and a key tool in a search for common identity amongst modern Americans. NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY DEKALB, ILLINOIS May 2015 I’M READY WARDEN: AN EXAMINATION OF THE RHETORIC OF DEATH BY ZAC WENDLER ©2015 Zac Wendler A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT FOR THE DEGREE REQUIREMENTS DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH Doctoral Director: John Schaeffer DEDICATION To my mother, for showing me that it could be done To my father, for encouraging me to see that it should be done And to my wife, for seeing that it was done TABLE OF CONTENTS: Chapter Page 1: EXECUTION IN AMERICA 1 Execution Before the Age of Print 6 Execution in the Late Renaissance 10 Execution in the Age of Print 16 Execution in the Victorian Era 22 Execution in the Modern Era 27 Demographics of the Dead 32 Changing Methods of Execution 34 Politics of Death 44 2: THEORETICAL APPROACHES 50 The Death Chamber as Recurring Rhetorical Situation 52 Final Statements as Genre 59 Burke, Bitzer, and Rhetorical Artistry 67 The Burkean Pentad as Situation 74 Terministic Screens 82 Terministic Screens and Final Utterance 87 Conclusions 91 3: RECORDS AND POLITICS 92 The Grim Reality of Government Records 97 Obtaining the Corpus 102 iv Chapter Page Technical Documentation and the Ethics of Public Records 107 Those Who Say Nothing 111 The Genres of Final Utterance 116 Statements of Affection 120 Statements of Defiance 122 Statements of Repentance 125 Statements of Spirituality 128 Subgenres 131 Correlations 137 4: DEAD MEN TALKING 144 Statement of Affection 152 Statement of Defiance 159 Statement of Repentance 166 Statement of Spirituality 171 Statement of Affection/Repentance 177 Statement of Affection/Spirituality 182 Statement of Repentance/Spirituality 187 Art and Argumentation 193 5: RHETORICAL ART AND THE CONTROVERSY OF DEATH 199 Transmissions in Relay 203 The State’s Rhetor 208 Local News 215 v Chapter Page National News 219 Advocates 228 Amnesty International 231 Justice for All 233 Death Penalty Reflections and Information 236 Parting Words 238 The Stories We Tell About Ourselves 240 BIBLIOGRAPHY 245 APPENDIX: PARTING WORDS 250 CHAPTER ONE: EXECUTION IN AMERICA “Let’s do it, man. Aint life a bitch?” G.W. Green, executed by lethal injection on October 18, 1991, at the James T. Vaughn Correctional Center. This study is about the dead and dying. It is about rhetoric, politics, and our society. It is about the moment at the end of someone’s life, when death is so plain and present that it might as well be a physical presence in the room. To say that thought on execution is complicated and controversial is a profound understatement. Whether a person supports or opposes the death penalty, thought on and about capital punishment has become a part of the political and philosophical lives of every man and woman in America. Execution is, for all of us, imbued with a significance which we cannot ignore. Here, we kill people when they kill others, if we find the crime to be outrageous enough. Why is this? Why do we execute criminals? Why are we so divided by the practice? Why, in short, does execution matter to us so much that it has become an integral part of political and philosophical identity in contemporary and historical America? These are questions without easy answers, and for them we must first examine the practice of execution from its deeper roots. But first, I feel that I ought to explain myself before I delve into the particulars of the execution process. This study does not aim at something fundamentally new or wholly unexpected. Rather, it taps into an ongoing multidisciplinary conversation which the field of rhetoric has not addressed in depth for some time as it dealt with fundamental, theoretical questions about the nature of rhetorical discourse itself. Armed with that theoretical knowledge, 2 we have been ready for some time to rejoin a scholarly conversation which has been active and vital for as long as the academy itself has been, but which we have largely neglected. While a full exploration of all aspects of the debate on capital punishment is impractical for a project of this scale, I seek to make a meaningful start here. I also feel the need at the outset of this project to make a clear delineation of what, exactly, I will be examining. This is a study of the last words of men and women executed in America between 1985 and the spring of 2013. It does not examine the last words of men or women who died outside of that timeframe, or in different contexts, be they of natural causes or as the victims of brutal crimes. I do this for two key reasons, both of them practical. First, without a limitation of the corpus, this project will stretch to infinity in all directions. I am looking here at modern final statements delivered by condemned men and women. The final statements of others, at other times and in other places, are of interest to me in principle, but the task of looking at even a single year's worth of final statements—a single month's worth, even— is a task so monumental that no human being could hope to finish it in his or her lifetime. The second reason for my limitation of the corpus is that we do not keep transcriptions of the typical death-moment outside of death chambers, and as such have almost nothing in the way of concrete, reliable records-keeping to fuel such an examination. While I could theoretically rely upon the eyewitness recollections of those present at the death of another, there are deep and complex bibliographic issues with such an approach, as I will demonstrate in detail. Such confusion would make separate consideration of what people said and how you and I reinterpret and transform those words impossible. 3 We privilege people's final statements in our culture; many others do as well, but the social importance that we put on final utterances of all kinds in America makes this of special importance to us, as we see a person's final utterance as the last page in their life, after which the metaphorical book may be closed. Final utterances in our culture are about closure, naturally, but are just as crucially about power, social normalization, and the belief that, in even the worst amongst us, there is something essentially human, some encapsulation of experience and knowledge and which will bubble to the surface at the last moments of a person's life that only those about to die can state clearly. To that end, a rhetorical examination of final statements is, effectively, a rhetorical examination of what it means to end a life as a society. It is microcosmic in almost every way, reducing the entire idea of a capital offense to a person and a victim, the idea of justice to a judge and a warden, and the idea of proportional punishment to a single act. It defies typical rhetorical discourse models by refusing to deal with anything abstract, and instead simply focuses on what is, what was, and what those things mean. Even if we set aside questions of justice, ethics, and process1 to engage with the utterances of the condemned as simple statements, rhetoric is central to every aspect of the execution process. Execution is the ultimate way that a society can use to say that some behaviors cannot be tolerated, and to instill a corresponding set of ethical values to its citizenry. 1 Questions of ethics, process, and justice are the terms upon which the larger political debate on capital punishment in America are held. In this case, there's really no sensible way to address final statements as rhetorical artifacts delivered in a real, physical context if we also draw politics into the picture because that political context is generally applied to the last words of the executed post facto, by observers and commentators and politicians. I do not, in other words, seek to consider these final statements in an entirely apolitical context—the political stances that the condemned take themselves are of enormous interest to me—but I do wish to look at them without the politics we bring to the room. Confusing the politics of the living with those of the condemned has been typical in almost every examination of last words to date, whether rhetorical or otherwise, and it is a trap I am trying to avoid. 4 Each particular execution is an exhibition which makes the process of punishment and justice clear and openly known to all. It is the social equivalent to a rattlesnake's tail: pass this point and die. The method of execution, be it electrocution, hanging, lethal injection, or any of the myriad other ways which humans have devised to end each other's lives, is itself a rhetorical statement that simply ending life is not sufficient; the condemned must suffer, as they do in even the most humane execution methods.