Summary Of Daniel Lachance's Executing Freedom

Throughout history, media has attempted to reflect the perceptions of social, political, and private issues through various mediums. One medium in particular, therefore, has been the law. The law is reflective of society, and society is reflected in the media. The larger social processes that occur in society tend to be reflected in whatever movies, television shows, and music is created. In Daniel LaChance’s book Executing Freedom, the reader gets a glimpse into how capital punishment and, specifically, the death penalty has caused people to change their perspective on the issue throughout United States history. Lachance organizes his argument by providing evidence as to how the legal consciousness of Americans is formed through the inherently
How people think about the law, how the laws affect themselves and the world around them is all a part of forming a legal consciousness. The formation of a legal consciousness is found in how people understand legal processes and hold views on legal issues based on how they have been previously treated with the law, used the law, or witnessed someone using the law. As a result, legal consciousness is a complex part of being a part of society where, in most cases, the law is at the top and everyone else is at the bottom. One of the most recent thought-provoking books on the issue of capital punishment in the U.S. is Daniel Lachance’s book that articulates key aspects regarding how society’s perspective on capital punishment has been influenced by a multitude of factors, including the role of the media. Lachance articulates several eras for movies and media consumption that held inherently positive views on capital punishment that whitewashed the reality of the death penalty in the
The murder of a black person had to be much more heinous than that of a white person for prosecutors to seek, and juries to impose, a death sentence” (Lachance, 106).
Understanding the awful discriminatory facts about the death penalty, Hollywood worked to make it seem like the racial bias of the death penalty was no longer present. The influence that Hollywood has not only on society but on how individuals grow and learn to think about the world is monstrous. Therefore, when Hollywood tried to produce movies with an explicit error in interpreting the role of capital punishment in society, people listened, they watched, and eventually, they believed. “Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, Hollywood films assured audiences that anti-black racism no longer infected the practice of capital punishment in the United States. State killing, they showed, was an act that primarily targeted white people and was carried out by racially diverse prison personnel” (Lachance,