Murder Stories engages with the current theoretical debate in death
penalty research on the role of cultural commitments to 'American'
ideologies in the retention of capital punishment. The central aim of
the study is to illuminate the elusive yet powerful role of ideology in
legal discourses. Through analyzing the content and processes of death
penalty narratives, this research illuminates the covert life of 'the
American Creed, ' (a nexus of ideologies-liberty, egalitarianism,
individualism, populism, and laissez faire-said to be unique to the
United States) in the law. Murder Stories draws on the entire record of
California death sentence resulting trials from three large and diverse
California counties for the years 1996 - 2004, as well as interviews
with 26 capital caseworkers (attorneys, judges, and investigators) from
the same counties. Employing the theoretical framework proposed by Ewick
and Silbey (1995) to study hegemonic and subversive narratives, and also
the ethnographic approach advocated by Amsterdam and Hertz (1992) to
study the producers and processes of constructing legal narratives, this
book traces the ideological content carried within the stories told by
everyday practitioners of capital punishment by investigating the
content, process, and ideological implications of these narratives. The
central theoretical finding is that the narratives constructed by both
prosecutors and defenders tend to instantiate rather than subvert the
ideological tenets of the American Creed.