Executing Freedom by Daniel Lachance

Author:Daniel Lachance [LaChance, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226066721
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

The consequence, Hatch argued, was that the law appeared to be simultaneously weak-willed and cruel, or at least cruel in its weakness.

Hatch related the story of William Andrews, who forced his victims to drink Drano and drove pencils through their eardrums before killing them. Andrews sat on death row for eighteen years and launched thirty appeals during that time. The result, in Hatch’s view, was a legitimation crisis for the state: “You wonder why people in this country are worried about the laws and do not believe in them,” Hatch said, disgusted. “Every time [Andrews] brought up a habeas corpus petition, the victims and their families had to relive the whole murder situation again.”29 If the Willie Horton campaign ad presented the death penalty as an effective antidote to complex bureaucratic prison systems that were run according to a technocratic logic most Americans did not understand, the demand for habeas reform revealed the alienating effects of a different kind of logic—that of procedural justice. Capital punishment had promised unadulterated justice, but its supporters found it had become just as mired in technobabble as the rest of the criminal justice system.

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