Doctoral Dissertation Research: Expert Knowledges and the Cultural Defense in California Capital Sentencing

这项研究是对1978年至今加州死刑量刑审判中文化观念作为减刑因素的使用方式的研究。这项研究运用历史学和人种学的方法，调查了人类学和心理学这两种特殊的专业知识是如何对死刑量刑中的所谓文化辩护做出贡献的。主要目标是审查a)律师和法官对专家知识的期望，b)不同类型的文化专门知识的表达方式，以及c)专门知识机构之间不断变化的关系及其在资本缓解中的使用。通过跟踪人类学和心理学在死刑诉讼中发挥不同作用的过程，该项目试图说明法律的变化，并通过对不同形式的专家知识之间和不同形式的专家知识之间的多样性作出不断变化的反应来构建专门知识。这个项目的学术价值在于它对文化防卫、法律人类学和死刑的大部分未被探索的方面进行了调查。在法律分析和理论法学领域的重要工作的基础上，这项研究将应用文化分析的人类学和社会法律技术来研究行动中的文化辩护。关于美国法律的民族志研究倾向于关注纠纷解决和其他类型的民事索赔，但很少有关于刑事背景下的法律程序的民族志研究。此外，人类学对总体上关于死刑的持续研究的贡献令人惊讶地少，尽管对种族、身份和正义的文化理解有学科影响。通过强调专门知识的演变，本研究旨在综合这些研究差距，其更广泛的影响在于其在死刑审判史上的独特地位。美国最高法院最近的裁决宣布，青少年和智障人士绝对不会被判处死刑。反死刑倡导者将重点放在精神病患者身上，将其作为明确豁免的下一个目标群体。由于文化背景的概念对精神病理诊断的影响越来越大，这项研究有可能帮助形成对哪些类别的个人应该免除死刑的司法理解。更广泛地说，对专门知识的系统分析将为关于文化与死刑诉讼的相关性的规范性辩论提供重要的经验基础。因此，调查结果与个别法院的证据政策有关，也与被要求提出文化辩护的首都律师和专家证人未来的做法有关。

This research is a study of the ways in which the idea of culture has been used as a mitigating factor in California capital sentencing trials from 1978 to the present. Using historical and ethnographic methods, the research investigates how two particular kinds of expert knowledge anthropology and psychology have contributed to the so-called cultural defense in capital sentencing. The main objectives are to examine a) the expectations that attorneys and judges have of expert knowledge, b) the ways in which different sorts of cultural expertise become articulated, and c) the shifting relationships between bodies of expertise and their use in capital mitigation. By tracking the processes by which anthropology and psychology have acquired distinct roles in death penalty litigation, this project seeks to account for changes in the laws construction of expertise through its evolving responses to diversity between and within different forms of expert knowledge. The intellectual merit of this project lies in its investigation of largely unexplored aspects of the cultural defense, the anthropology of law, and the death penalty. Building on important work in the areas of legal analysis and doctrinal jurisprudence, the research will apply anthropological and socio-legal techniques of cultural analysis to study the cultural defense in action. Ethnographies on American law have tended to focus on dispute resolution and other kinds of civil claims, but there exists little ethnographic work on legal processes in the criminal context. In addition, anthropology has contributed surprisingly few sustained studies relating to the death penalty in general, despite disciplinary implications for cultural understandings of race, identity, and justice. By emphasizing the evolution of specialized knowledge, the study aims to synthesize these research gaps.The broader impacts of the research lie with its unique position in the history of death penalty adjudication. Recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have declared juveniles and the mentally retarded to be categorically exempt from the death penalty. Anti-death penalty advocates have focused on the mentally ill as the next target group for categorical exemption. Because the idea of cultural context has come to have increasing influence on the diagnosis of mental pathology, this research has the potential to help shape judicial understandings of what classes of individuals ought to be exempt from capital punishment. More generally, systematic analysis of expertise will provide an important empirical foundation for normative debates about the relevance of culture in capital litigation. Thus, the findings are relevant to the evidentiary policies of individual courts, as well as the future practices of capital attorneys and expert witnesses called upon to present a cultural defense.