Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Interpreting the Violent State
- PART I ON THE FORMS OF STATE KILLING
- 2 The Innocuousness of State Lethality in an Age of National Security
- 3 Oedipal Sovereignty and the War in Iraq
- 4 Sacrifice and Sovereignty
- 5 Due Process and Lethal Confinement
- 6 From Time to Torture: The Hellish Future of the Criminal Sentence
- 7 The Child in the Broom Closet: States of Killing and Letting Die
- 8 The Lethality of the Canadian State's (Re)cognition of Indigenous Peoples
- PART II INVESTIGATING THE DISCOURSES OF DEATH
- Index
- References
5 - Due Process and Lethal Confinement
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Interpreting the Violent State
- PART I ON THE FORMS OF STATE KILLING
- 2 The Innocuousness of State Lethality in an Age of National Security
- 3 Oedipal Sovereignty and the War in Iraq
- 4 Sacrifice and Sovereignty
- 5 Due Process and Lethal Confinement
- 6 From Time to Torture: The Hellish Future of the Criminal Sentence
- 7 The Child in the Broom Closet: States of Killing and Letting Die
- 8 The Lethality of the Canadian State's (Re)cognition of Indigenous Peoples
- PART II INVESTIGATING THE DISCOURSES OF DEATH
- Index
- References
Summary
Even when it comes to “being a guerilla,” a label alone does not render a person susceptible to execution or other criminal punishment.
– Justice Anthony Stevens, in response to Justice Clarence Thomas's dissent in Hamdan v. RumsfeldHow simple would be the tasks of constitutional adjudication and of law generally if specific problems could be solved by inspection of the labels pasted on them!
– Chief Justice Earl Warren, Trop v. DullesNew World Security
As the White House of George W. Bush continues to incarcerate the innocent in Guantánamo Bay, to rewrite international law, and to use techniques that are cruel, inhuman, and degrading, we read complaints about an administration outside the law, secret CIA sites that are lawless, and “war prisons” that create a legal vacuum for more than 30,000 detainees in U.S. military prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay. Being outside legality might not be the point, however. Before the “global war on terror” and the export of local prison practice to a network of overseas prisons, numerous U.S. Supreme Court decisions in dialogue with prison correctional policy had already retooled the incidence of civil death for the incarcerated. Not only has this limited the reach of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence but also it has redefined the substance of the due process clause.
To the extent that the probable cause and due process protections of the Constitution are ignored and abolished in the wake of the war on terror, the directive achieving such ends is illegal by any post–Magna Carta standard.
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- Chapter
- Information
- States of ViolenceWar, Capital Punishment, and Letting Die, pp. 127 - 149Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009