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

本研究旨在探讨从1978年至今，在加州死刑审判中，文化因素是如何被用作减刑因素的。运用历史学和民族志的方法，考察了人类学和心理学两种特殊的专业知识对死刑判决中所谓的文化辩护的贡献。主要目的是审查a)律师和法官对专家知识的期望，b)不同类型的文化专业知识的表达方式，以及c)专业知识机构之间的关系变化及其在减刑中的应用。通过追踪人类学和心理学在死刑诉讼中发挥独特作用的过程，该项目试图通过对不同形式的专家知识之间和内部多样性的不断演变的反应来解释法律对专业知识的建构方面的变化。这个项目的知识价值在于它对文化防御、法律人类学和死刑等尚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，研究将运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防御。研究美国法律的民族志倾向于关注争端解决和其他类型的民事索赔，但很少有关于刑事背景下法律程序的民族志工作。此外，尽管对种族、身份和正义的文化理解具有学科意义，但人类学对死刑总体上的持续研究的贡献少得惊人。通过强调专业知识的演变，本研究旨在综合这些研究空白。该研究的广泛影响在于其在死刑裁判史上的独特地位。美国最高法院最近的判决宣布，青少年和智障者绝对免于死刑。反对死刑的倡导者们把重点放在了精神病患者身上，把他们作为绝对豁免的下一个目标群体。由于文化背景的概念对精神病理的诊断有越来越大的影响，这项研究有可能有助于形成对哪些类别的个人应该免于死刑的司法理解。更一般地说，对专业知识的系统分析将为关于资本诉讼中文化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死刑律师和专家证人的未来做法有关。

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.