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

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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.