Perspective From An Electric Chair

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DeBlanc had been best friends with Thomas and his decision was greeted with dismay by whites in the small Cajun town. Resweber , U. These included violations of equal protection , double jeopardy , and cruel and unusual punishment. The US Supreme Court rejected the appeal. Subsequently, Willie Francis was returned to the electric chair on May 9, He told reporter Elliott Chaze a couple of days before the execution that he was going to meet the Lord with his "Sunday pants and Sunday heart.

Willie Francis' short life was the subject of a documentary, titled Willie Francis Must Die Again, written and directed by filmmaker Allan Durand. The film, narrated by actor Danny Glover , chronicles the full story of his case and the unprecedented court battle that followed his failed execution. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

For the Scottish swimmer, see Willie Francis swimmer. For the ska and reggae singer, see Willie Francis singer. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. June Learn how and when to remove this template message. Retrieved 1 November He is being convicted and sentenced to death for murder, again. The same people surround him in the courtroom, but their identities and roles have changed e.

The story begins to proceed as before. Although no source material appears on screen, the episode is likely adapted from writer Charles Beaumont's short story "Traumerei" which roughly translates from the German as "daydream" or "reverie" which originally appeared in the February, issue of Infinity Science Fiction.

Beaumont's teleplay features passages taken wholly and unchanged from his earlier story. This episode was remade under the same title as part of the s series in which Peter Coyote played Adam Grant.

Writers Minute: Perspective from an Electric Chair

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. April Learn how and when to remove this template message. The Twilight Zone Vortex.

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Views Read Edit View history. Languages Nederlands Edit links. As long as there has been capital punishment—as long as there has existed a social relation, in other words—the visibility of execution has been critical to both the ideology of deterrence and the politics of the power of state authority over bare life. It is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. It restores sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular Not only must the people know, they must see with their own eyes.

The Panopticon was a new form of prison architecture, in which the warden remained concealed from view in his central watchtower, and as such the prisoner remained uncertain as to whether he was being watched. In the s in the United States, the progressive withdrawal of public executions began, from public streets and squares to prison courtyards to within the walls of the prisons themselves. From the gallows to firing squads to the chair—which for most scholars represents its principle modern iteration—its operations became increasingly tidy, bureaucratized, and medicalized.

The techno-rationalization of capital punishment coincided with the event becoming less visible to the public.

Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa | University of Ottawa Press

Emblematic of that shift, its witnesses became less present, and represented, as well Figure 6. Significantly, when representations of the chair do include the presence of a witness, they usually picture an event at some distance from the polite speech associated with conventional state authority.

PERSPECTIVE FROM AN ELECTRIC CHAIR

Its absence of any historical referent in his work—its lack of narrative content—is to the point: For there can be no useful iconography to decode without a store of representations, no buried history to uncover without clues or a paper trail. In the s, the New York State Gerry Commission was formed to investigate the possibilities of creating a new and more humane means of capital punishment.

Hence the potential to exploit the new medium of electricity to affect a quick and painless death was considered. The motivations, it turns out, were not purely humanitarian but rather far more complex.

As a result, Edison stood to lose big in the public utilities game, and so the great American inventor did what any upstanding capitalist would do: Both he and Brown mounted an increasingly visible program to discredit widespread public use of alternating current. Dogs, horses, cows, and even an elephant were felled in this electrified spectacle—cum—negative advertisement, a kind of death circus in the culture of Gilded Age invention. The strategy was transparent: In my necessarily brief take on this history, I mean to stress the contradictions attending the invention of the electric chair as a media instrument falling somewhere between public and private spheres of influence.

And this is in keeping with even more outrageous recent controversies. The tradition of having official witnesses present at an execution remains law in the thirty-six states maintaining capital punishment; on average, states require somewhere between six and twelve witnesses representing a cross-section of state citizenry. A few from the media, a few from law enforcement, and a few professionals attend these events 23 Figure 6. In , Albert Camus wrote on capital punishment in terms that resonate well with Warhol, foreshadowing current debates about public executions on pay-per-view cable, the Net, talk shows, and closed-circuit television What exactly can we see?

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To claim, as I have, that the chair figures the state of exception means we have to grapple with what is visually exceptional about it. As Foster notes in his discussion of Warhol, the classic imagery of the sovereign is organized around a unified body politic, which centralizes, subsumes, and ultimately subordinates a mass of individuals into the totemic profile of the Leviathan.

A democratic sovereignty is an infinitely more fragile thing, far more difficult to represent, because it is constituted not around the one but the many. Its prevailing fiction is that we are all integrated in the mechanisms of state power, which logically suggests we are encoded in its visual representations. Take, for instance, the formal repetitions that form the bedrock of his practice and the way in which they position state power in these works on the cusp of visibility. But reproducibility, in this case, is not the same thing as visibility, and repetition, as Deleuze painstakingly reminded us, is no guarantor of either identity or sameness.

There is, I want to say, a strikingly aniconic tendency at work here. Paradoxically, as a result of this alloverness, the image cannot be confronted head on.

Notice that that placement of the blanks never works to bisect the larger composition evenly; Warhol is not providing us with a binocular perspective, or giving equal visual weight to each element in the diptych, but decentralizes our larger reception of the image as a whole. In , when the series was first shown in Paris, a critic could write of the blue version of this novel composition: The color signals the crime of an absence, become empty, become dead, become the systematic annulment of life.

Such a diptych accents the expression of anguish with a moment of truth lived in the absolute. And yet the color of Silver Disaster in particular inflects our current reading somewhat differently. We should note that Warhol used silver for the first time with the electric chair series, as he also did the blanks. In either case, vision is partially and tendentiously blocked. Warhol will obliquely point to this place with his electric chairs. Let me emphasize, though, that this is not simply a politics of simulations—of the roaring emptiness of the signifier—so much as it underscores the deeply material consequences of that which stands in excess of such images, or, to follow Agamben, is exceptional to it.

To close, I want to dramatize the continuing relevance of the larger issue the electric chairs articulates Figures 9. Here, then, we might compare two images that are at once horribly familiar and yet hardly familiar enough. Sometime in the late summer of , the poster based on the photograph appeared in the New York subway system and elsewhere. Its crisply buoyant design and jaunty colors were an explicitly negative homage to the Apple Universe and its endless relay between media images and media props.

A shadow figure of Abu Ghraib appears as a kind of blind-spot persona—a phantom blankness—stamped out from the very fabric of commodity culture, an advertisement. In turn that blankness is seized by an electrical current, a potential or deterrent threat, itself held out of sight. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Meridian Press, Stanford University, An Unnatural American History. McFarland and Company Inc. Harvard University Press,

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