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Therapeutic and Material <Victim> hood: Ideology and
the Struggle for Meaning in the Illinois Death Penalty
Controversy
Bryan J. McCann

Online Publication Date: 01 December 2007

To cite this Article: McCann, Bryan J. (2007) 'Therapeutic and Material <Victim>
hood: Ideology and the Struggle for Meaning in the Illinois Death Penalty
Controversy ', Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 4:4, 382 - 401
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 Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies
Vol. 4, No. 4, December 2007, pp. 382401
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Therapeutic and Material

BVictimhood: Ideology and the
Struggle for Meaning in the Illinois
Death Penalty Controversy
Bryan J. McCann

This article analyzes the struggle over the Bvictim ideograph following former Illinois
Governor George Ryan’s decision to commute all state death sentences in 2003. A
therapeutic rendering of the Bvictim ideograph typified mainstream opposition to
Ryan’s move. This approach personalized the death penalty at the expense of discussing
its social and political implications. In contrast, the discourse of George Ryan and his
supporters offered a material Bvictimhood grounded in political, historical, and
economic contextualization. By performing a historical materialist critique of this
dialogue, I conclude that rhetorically deploying the figure of a material Bvictim is an
indispensable strategy for the abolitionist movement in that it allows activists to
capitalize on the ideological constraints of liberalism while maintaining an awareness of
capital punishment’s implications in a capitalist society.

Keywords: Historical Materialism; Death Penalty; Ideograph; George Ryan; Therapeutic

Rhetoric; Victim

On January 11, 2003, former Illinois Governor George Ryan declared his state’s death
penalty system ‘‘arbitrary and capricious*and therefore immoral.’’1 As a result, he
emptied the state’s death row. Ryan commuted all but three of Illinois’ 167 death
sentences to life terms. This bold and controversial gesture followed a two-year
moratorium on executions in Illinois, implemented in response to a study by a

Bryan J. McCann is a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin. This article was derived from the author’s
Master’s thesis, completed at Illinois State University in 2004 and directed by Craig Cutbirth. An earlier version
was presented at the 2005 annual conference of the National Communication Association in Chicago. In
addition to Dr. Cutbirth, the author wishes to thank Dana Cloud, John Baldwin, Stephen Hartnett, John
McHale, Joseph Zompetti, editor John Sloop, and two blind reviewers for helpful suggestions and comments.
Correspondence: Bryan J. McCann, Department of Communication Studies, The University of Texas at Austin,
1 University Station A1105, Austin, TX 78712-0115, USA. E-mail: bmccann@mail.utexas.edu

ISSN 1479-1420 (print)/ISSN 1479-4233 (online) # 2007 National Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/14791420701632931
 Therapeutic and Material BVictimhood 383

Ryan-appointed commission that documented more than 80 serious flaws with the
system.2 The Land of Lincoln had executed 12 individuals since 1977 and exonerated
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13 after new evidence revealed their innocence.3 Many of those exonerated had
confessed under torture.4 Critics also cited a variety of racial, geographic, and class
disparities as reasons to halt the state’s death penalty system.5
The commutations, enacted two days before the end of Ryan’s scandal-ridden term
as governor, were largely motivated by the Illinois legislature’s failure to implement
any of the reforms recommended by the commission.6 Ryan claimed that the Illinois
death penalty system was broken beyond repair. Since his action, Ryan has
been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times, and his actions have raised
activists’ hopes for statewide abolition.7 The death row in Illinois is still under a
moratorium; meanwhile, Governor Rod Blagojevich is seeking to re-implement
capital punishment.8
The Illinois moratorium and commutations mobilized the national anti-death
penalty movement, prompting new debate as to whether inmates and those executed
constituted victims of a broken system.9 Popular controversy over the decision
revolved around who counts as a victim, and the term Bvictim emerges as an
ideograph out of this debate.10 This article will discuss the struggle over the
Bvictim ideograph in the context of the Illinois commutations, arguing that the
rhetorical strategies invoked by both sides of the issue constituted a tension between
therapeutic and material Bvictimhood. Therapeutic Bvictimhood is under-
stood here as an affective strategy that emphasizes personal suffering and healing in
the context of criminality. In contrast, the rhetoric of George Ryan and his supporters
offered a material Bvictimhood grounded in political, historical, and economic
contextualization. I argue that the Bvictim ideograph is a potent linguistic marker
whose persuasive power encouraged voices from both sides of the Ryan controversy
to appropriate it toward their own rhetorical ends. Adopting a historical materialist
perspective, I advocate a material Bvictimhood as an alternative to the prevailing
therapeutic discourses supporting capital punishment.
Historical materialism is a critical perspective which argues that economic
conditions and ideological discourses are interactive and mutually conditioning. It
locates issues of social power within the broader context of a capitalist society, seeking
to understand how different forms of oppression work in tandem to reify class
relations and determine the conditions of possibility for intervention.11 As Teresa
Ebert writes:
[Materialist critique] shows that apparently disconnected zones of culture are in
fact materially linked through the highly differentiated, mediated, and dispersed
operation of a systematic logic of exploitation. In sum, materialist critique disrupts
‘‘what is’’ to explain how social differences*specifically gender, race, sexuality, and
class*have been systematically produced and continue to operate within regimes
of exploitation, so that we can change them.12
An historical materialist analysis of pro and anti-death penalty rhetoric allows the
critic to connect both to broader regimes of exploitation. Executing prisoners
scapegoated for social ills displaces public anxieties about crime away from demands
 384 B. J. McCann

for social services that might prevent crime in the first place. By locating social
responsibility on the body of the criminal, the system of capital punishment operates
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ideologically to legitimate privatized social responsibility in capitalism and reify the

discourses of racism that support capitalist exploitation.13
Further, a materialist analysis points out what should be obvious: Killing a convict
goes beyond discursive discipline. Historical materialism’s basis in class antagonisms
and shared interests offers a mechanism for judgment lacking in other, poststructur-
alism-inflected analyses of power. In defining discourse itself as material, such anti-
foundationalist perspectives deprive critics and activists of a material standard by
which discourses might be assessed. The death penalty is one instance where
understanding discourses in the context of capitalist society is crucial to critical
judgment. In sum, historical materialism offers insight into how capital punishment
can be analyzed and challenged as one instrument interwoven with others of capitalist
hegemony.14
At the same time, however, the Illinois commutations controversy shows how
discourses can be reconfigured to enable working-class consciousness and produce
relations of solidarity with those on death row. In order to investigate the nuances of
the arguments over capital punishment, I analyzed 34 pro-death penalty letters to the
editor published in several Midwest newspapers following the commutations from
January 12, 2003 to February 20, 2003. I also examined eleven speeches, articles, and
other texts of the anti-death penalty movement to examine how and if these different
groups contested the meaning and status of Bvictims in this debate. I analyzed the
letters and other texts to discover how their arguments explicitly and implicitly
cluster around the following questions: Who counts as a Bvictim in this text?
What compelling ideological strategies are enabled and disabled by the formulation of
Bvictims in the documents? And how are Bvictims articulated, if at all, to
broader communities and publics and systems of signification and oppression
(racism and capitalism) in this discourse? In the process of reading the letters to the
editor, the following themes emerged: The lens of Bvictimhood, culprits as a point
of contrast, the exclusivity of Bvictimhood, and George Ryan’s betrayal of the
public as Bvictim. Since the sample of anti-death penalty rhetoric was decidedly
smaller, I chose to place all texts under the single category of ‘‘ BVictims of an
Unjust System.’’
When considering the Illinois commutation controversy, we are left with a choice
between a therapeutic discourse that divorces capital punishment from its socio-
economic context or a materialist strategy that understands the death penalty as an
apparatus that ‘‘makes us fearful and dependent on the illusion of state protection,
that divides rather than unites, that promises simple solutions to complex
problems.’’15 The United States is the only developed Western nation to practice
capital punishment. It has put innocents to death and routinely punishes the poor
and oppressed in carrying out death sentences.16 A moralistic rhetoric focusing
exclusively on individual culpability or individual redemption cannot account for the
structural and collective implications of a critique of the death penalty. Only a
perspective grounded in dialectical relationships of a capitalist society provides the
 Therapeutic and Material BVictimhood 385

resources for critique and solidarity that escapes the constraints of an individualistic
frame grounded in affective rather than material interests.
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After introducing a materialist approach to ideographic struggle and conceptualiz-

ing the Bvictim ideograph as a persuasive trope in contemporary liberal society,
this article performs an analysis of therapeutic and materialist renderings of the
ideograph across the Ryan controversy.17 I call attention to both the affective,
constitutive, and non-contextual features of pro-death penalty discourse, on the one
hand, and the materialist, political, and embodied features of anti-death penalty
inflections of the Bvictim ideograph, on the other. Finally, I discuss the uses,
limitations, and ultimate indispensability of discourses of Bvictimhood for death
penalty abolitionism and other struggles for justice.

Critical Rhetoric and the BVictim Ideograph

Michel Foucault argues that punishment is consistently referential to something other
than itself. He explains, ‘‘The carceral texture of society . . . is . . . the apparatus of
punishment that conforms most completely to the new economy of power and the
instrument for the formation of knowledge that this very economy needs.’’18 John
Sloop elaborates this premise, claiming that ‘‘the behavior, morality, and subjectivity
of all members of a culture are tied to the way misbehavior . . . is represented in mass-
media outlets and public arguments.’’19 Such analysis is an important tool in
understanding the role of prisons and punishment as repressive institutions and sites
for discourses that regulate society as a whole.
However, such a perspective, particularly one grounded in Foucault’s later work,
risks divorcing punishment from its objective connection to material relationships.20
In contrast, I am aligned with historical materialist scholars like Dana Cloud, who
might note that however its discourses distribute its subjects symbolically, capital
punishment actually disproportionately targets the poor, uneducated, and ethnic
minorities, and is, therefore, connected to a broader regime of social and economic
stratification.21 The trope of the Bvictim is articulated not only in relation to other
discourses but also to an economic system whose agents struggle to define victims in
particular, ideological ways.
Michael McGee’s conceptualization of ideographs is helpful in understanding the
way in which discourse is shaped by material needs and realities. McGee understands
ideology as a political language with the power to ‘‘dictate decision and control public
belief and behavior.’’22 McGee claims, ‘‘Human beings are ‘conditioned’ not directly
to belief and behavior, but to a vocabulary of concepts that function as guides,
warrants, reasons, or excuses for behavior and belief.’’23 Ideographs are the key terms
and slogans of a culture that define what it means to be part of a system and how one
should behave toward that end. They are also constantly sites of struggle, as those
who successfully lay claim to an ideograph enjoy a significant persuasive advantage.
While any ideograph will have a historically rooted meaning (diachronic
structure), a critic must also scrutinize its ‘‘synchronic relationships’’ within a
specific context. Scholars have used ideograph analysis to investigate several arenas in
 386 B. J. McCann

political culture, ranging from society’s master narratives to more specific partisan
controversies.24 As Condit and Lucaites explain, ‘‘each usage adds as by precedent
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to the range of meanings available to a particular ideograph.’’ Thus, an ideograph’s

meaning is inherently unsettled and determined by its usage in a particular context.
They also note that ‘‘There are discernible limits to how an ideograph can be
employed in public argumentation, but they are specifically rhetorical limits, that is, a
function of the history of [its] usages in a particular historical community.’’25 Thus,
an ideograph’s meaning is necessarily connected to historical material relations,
explaining how, for example, conservative rhetors were able to lay claim to the
ideograph Bfamily values as a means of reinforcing free-market capitalist
ideology.26
The struggle over the Bvictim ideograph in the Illinois commutation
controversy represents a conflict over the terms of solidarity and location of blame
with regards to crime and criminality. Individuals are joined either by their shared
affective trauma or by material suffering, and crime is either a product of individual,
localized evil, or an expression of complex social relationships. As Kenneth Burke
writes, casting oneself as a Bvictim allows for the transference of anxiety onto a
vilified scapegoat.27 Charles J. Sykes describes the ‘‘ethos of victimization’’ as
pervasive in American political and popular culture, as virtually any given public
becomes anxious to lay claim to the role of the Bvictim as a means of acquiring
credibility. He argues that ‘‘compassion for the less fortunate has always been a mark
of the nation’s underlying decency and morality.’’28 For both Burke and Sykes, the
Bvictim ideograph is a convenient strategy by which publics can deflect blame and
insist upon their own moral purity by being a Bvictim or sympathizing with one. I
now turn to a discussion of the ways in which the Bvictim has been enlisted to
reify the American tradition of crime and punishment.

BVictims in the Criminal Justice System

The criminal justice system is an instrument of the state whose punishing power has
substantial material consequences, but is simultaneously supported through symbolic
discourse.29 One of the ways in which the state’s power to punish is ensured is
through the therapeutic enlistment of the Bvictim ideograph. C. L. Ten posits that
punishing criminals is seen as the ultimate corrective act that a government can
deliver to a Bvictim toward alleviating the trauma inflicted by criminality.30 The
most important dimension of a therapeutic Bvictimhood is its ability to silence
deliberation. In the discourse of crime and punishment, Bvictims are constructed
as necessarily pure in nature.31 As Robert Elias explains, the trauma that Bvictims
experience generally renders them immune to criticism, as affective sympathy for
such experiences obscures any political dimensions.32
Scholars argue that therapeutic renderings of Bvictimhood risk diverting
attention from the broader social dimensions of criminal justice by personalizing and
sensitizing individual trials. Lynne N. Henderson and Jennifer K. Wood have
criticized the centrality of Bvictim narratives in criminal trials because they put
 Therapeutic and Material BVictimhood 387
33
the defense at a disadvantage. To contest affective suffering is to assume the
uncomfortable label of ‘‘anti-Bvictim.’’ Dubber claims that Bvictims’ rights
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rhetoric is a spectacle which distracts public attention from the proliferation of harsh
penalties for drug crimes, while also increasing public dependence on the state to
deliver healing and closure for Bvictims.34 In what follows, I demonstrate how
such an affective rendering of Bvictimhood in the Illinois controversy framed
capital punishment as a personal, rather than social and political, issue.

Therapeutic BVictimhood as a Reification of Liberal Ideology

Dana Cloud describes therapeutic rhetoric as a ‘‘political strategy of contemporary
capitalism by which potential dissent is contained within a discourse of individual or
family responsibility.’’35 She argues that political and economic trends have
influenced the language of mental health professions, as ‘‘the impulse to examine,
express, analyze, and improve one’s ‘self ’ has intensified in proportion to the
expansion of industrial consumer society.’’36 Cloud adds, ‘‘The therapeutic provides a
frame for complaints against the system but ultimately recuperates and neutralizes
political opposition by rendering protest private.’’37 Thus, the therapeutic use of the
Bvictim ideograph reifies liberal hegemony by appropriating a philanthropic
affinity for the afflicted and downtrodden.
While the American debate over capital punishment is as old as the institution
itself, Theodore Hamm notes that the prevailing arguments at any given moment are
contingent upon historical and cultural contexts.38 The prevalence of the Bvictim
ideograph in the context of the death penalty reached an apex recently following the
Oklahoma City Bombing, in which victims’ families were instrumental in securing
the passage of the Victims’ Rights Clarification Act of 1997. As Wood writes, ‘‘In the
context of a national tragedy like the Oklahoma City bombing . . . arguments for legal
changes that would ease the victims’ suffering not only seemed compassionate but
also fundamentally necessary.’’39 A combination of the heinousness of bomber
Timothy McVeigh’s crimes and his apparent lack of remorse constituted a powerful
rhetorical resource in the federal government’s drive to win a death sentence.40 As a
result, the Bvictim ideograph gained national prominence and credibility in
the context of capital punishment. With the added propensity to look to the state for
affective healing in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the
Bvictim ideograph constituted a persuasive rhetorical strategy following the
Illinois commutations.41
Many critics of the Illinois commutations saw Ryan’s decision as an attempt to
secure a legacy in the wake of an otherwise scandalous term as Illinois Governor.42
Others questioned the legality of Ryan’s actions.43 However, most complaints were
waged by, or in the name of, Bvictims. Concerns regarding Bvictims were
espoused by several critics, not least of all families and loved ones themselves. Such
discourse allowed survivors to assume the role of the Bvictim in the deceased’s
absence. On an episode of the Oprah Winfrey show shortly following the
commutations, one Bvictim’s relative stated, ‘‘When Ryan announced that he
 388 B. J. McCann

was going to grant clemency to everyone on death row on Saturday, it was just as if
I’d gotten that phone call in the middle of the night again.’’44 Another individual on
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the same episode explained that Ryan had ‘‘smacked me in the face. [He has] knocked
me down.’’45 Ron Gierlowski, whose sister was killed in 1986, states, ‘‘The governor
has walked out of office and walked on our hearts.’’46 These families view the
execution of the murderer as the final step in the grieving process. Instead of allowing
this closure, Ryan had re-opened old wounds for these families.
The complaints of actual victims were quickly appropriated by others who, though
not directly involved in any of the cases, criticized Ryan in their names. Cook County
States Attorney Richard Devine described Ryan’s move as a ‘‘cruel hoax’’ on families
of the deceased.47 The States Attorney of DuPage County, Joe Birkett lamented, ‘‘He
hasn’t heard the cries of these families, and there’s nothing I can do or anyone can say
to undo the pain that he has inflicted on these families.’’48 Whether from families
themselves or detached critics, a therapeutic use of the Bvictim ideograph was
widespread among criticisms of Ryan’s decision. What follows is a thematic analysis
of letters to the editor demonstrating an evolution from a personal to a collective
therapeutic Bvictimhood.

The Lens of BVictimhood

A significant rhetorical strategy of the sampled letters is found in the assumption that
Bvictimhood is the only valid perspective from which to view the death penalty.
Lee McCulley asks Ryan to assume the role of the Bvictim and consider how he
might have acted otherwise:
[Dale] Lash was proven guilty with no doubts after his heinous act of raping and
killing a mother while her baby no doubt cried out from their vehicle. Even after his
very poor showing as a state official, I will never believe the governor would have
reached this questionable decision had one of these victims been his daughter or
grandchild or any member of his family.49
Michelle Stanze describes the inherent agency of the Bvictim  in capital
cases:
Although my husband was brutally murdered, I am still not a huge supporter of the
death penalty. I do believe, however, that the decision to seek and impose the death
penalty needs to be a collaborative decision among the prosecutors, family
members of the victims, judges and juries. It is not a decision to be made by one
man, far removed from the individual case. This is not the way to reform our
justice system.50
Ryan, his supporters, and readers are asked to conceptualize the emotional pain
of having a loved one fall prey to murder. The letters call upon the state to
deliver therapy, but on the murder Bvictim’s terms. According to these
authors, only Bvictims are legitimate speakers about capital punishment in
Illinois.
 Therapeutic and Material BVictimhood 389

Culprits as a Point of Contrast

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In addition to constructing the Bvictim ideograph as pure and inerrant in its

capacity to dictate the dispensing of justice, the pro-death penalty letters emphasize
the evil nature of the condemned in the commuted cases. Joseph Napolitano
contemplates the apparent message of the commutations; ‘‘So spread the word:
Illinois values your life, Mr. Murderer, much more than the lives of your victims.’’51
Mark Adcock contends that ‘‘The people who are laying cold in their graves and their
families have no rights in this state, but serial killers and corrupted officials do. Jan.
13 [The date of Ryan’s exit from office] will not come soon enough.’’52 J. R. Gitlin
invokes Biblical imagery, stating that Ryan ‘‘culminated his term of office as a hero to
cold-blooded killers, and as a Judas to the members of murder victims’ families.’’53
Vincent Moreth posits,
George Ryan’s legacy will not be that of a humanitarian; it will be a legacy of
mistrust and injustice for hundreds of those who lost loved ones at the hands of
convicted murderers who will never see justice done. George Ryan will go down in
history as the worst governor this state has ever had based upon this decision.54
These authors do not grant the condemned an identity beyond the scope of their evil
deeds, as they are only considered in opposition to their Bvictims.
Several letters go further to claim that the murderers’ fates should be
commensurate with the harm they bestowed upon Bvictims . Lynda Gates insists,
‘‘Unless Ryan can also grant clemency to the victims and bring them back; the killers
deserve exactly what they gave the victims*death.’’55 Similarly, Elizabeth Ladage
poses the question, ‘‘Who is going to grant pardons to the victims and their families?
Think about that while you are trying to sleep.’’56 A third letter, by Sharon Fox,
compares the sentences of the commuted individuals with the suffering of families
who lost loved ones to murder:
Well, Governor Ryan sure left his blemish on our state. I feel so bad for the victims’
families. I’ll bet they are wishing that their loved ones could have their sentences
commuted. . . . Maybe Ryan should be the one to tell Lori Hayes’ baby that when
she grows up her tax money will be supporting the murderer who killed her mother
and left her to die in the back of a car.57
Such letters hold Ryan to the impossible task of resurrecting the dead in order to heal
the hurt imposed by murderers. The rights of offenders and Bvictims  are seen as
mutually exclusive. These authors claim that Ryan cannot help one without hurting
the other, as the evil deeds of murderers preclude any justification for Ryan’s decision
to commute their sentences.
Several letters make a more explicit case for the functionality of the death penalty
in delivering therapy to Bvictims, denying the condemned any person-hood
outside of their Bvictims’ affective needs. Barry Halford laments that ‘‘The
victims’ families I am sure will not find any comfort knowing that their loved ones’
murderers will spend their lives in the coziness of a cell complete with free medical,
dental, hot meals and an education to boot.’’58 Corrine Sheridan, who has
experienced the loss of a loved one to murder states:
 390 B. J. McCann

My heart goes out to all the victims’ families that have been affected by our
governor’s decision to commute all the death sentences to life. I could have easily
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been one of those victims, but my sister’s killer had the decency to kill himself. Now
the only resolution these poor people have in this life is when they take their last
breath here on Earth.59
These letters claim that the commutations have denied countless Bvictims the
therapy of seeing the culprit executed. Healing will come slowly as they have to wait
for it to come naturally. Within such a discourse, the death penalty is no longer a
complex social issue, but instead becomes a consolation. Furthermore, as I
demonstrate below, those who enlist the ideograph Bvictim toward a pro-death
penalty end strictly limit access to the resources of the ideograph.

The Exclusivity of BVictimhood

The sanctity of Bvictimhood is also highlighted by its exclusivity. Some letters
place a premium on the role of the Bvictim, as Ryan is called to task for placing
murderers in such a sacred category. For example, Michelle Stanze continues:
These families never have closure at the end of the trials. There is no such thing as
closure for the families of murder victims. They did, however, have the comfort of
knowing that the legal proceedings were behind them, and that the decisions had
been made. It is a sad day for America when the decision of one man outweighs the
beliefs of its citizens. I am truly sorry for all the real victims’ families.60
Robert J. Fechter laments the manner in which Ryan ‘‘single-handedly turned vicious
murderers*all of them convicted by judge and jury, and all of them run through the
appeals process*into victims of society.’’61 This narrative resists Ryan’s attempt to
grant convicts Bvictim status. For the pro-death penalty writers, convicted
murderers have no legitimate claim to this language. Ryan’s suggestion that they do
constitutes nothing less than a flagrant act of betrayal.

George Ryan’s Betrayal of BVictims

Authors also chastise Ryan for disregarding the affective needs of the deceased and
their families. Phil Grimes states that ‘‘while there were some cases that needed
examination, there was no need to spit on the faces of the families of those many
murder victims he ignored.’’62 Michelle Stanze, once again, argues, ‘‘The individual
hearings were a reasonable solution and could have been used to attain his goal of
making sure that no innocent person was put to death. It appears, however, that these
hearings, which undoubtedly caused further anguish to the victims’ family members,
were simply a farce to temporarily placate the families until the end of Ryan’s term.’’63
Any bump in the road toward execution disrupted the healing these authors feel
Ryan, as governor, owed to Bvictims.
Because Ryan is a representative political figure, criticisms of him also have a
political character. In indicting Ryan, these letters broaden the scope of the
 Therapeutic and Material BVictimhood 391

Bvictim ideograph by including all people of Illinois. Dale Vogt contemplates

Ryan’s crimes against all Bvictims associated with the commutation scandal:
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Courageous? Forget about the long hours spent by our law enforcement officials
tracking down and capturing these criminals. Forget about the victims’ and their
families’ agony. Forget about the jurors who believed that the crimes were so
heinous as to deserve the ultimate penalty. Ryan is ‘‘courageous.’’ I’m sure that the
editorial staff of the Post-Dispatch went to bed that night and slept soundly,
knowing that, once again, it had displayed its moral superiority over the rest of us. I
doubt that the same can be said for the families of the victims.64
Beyond disregarding the pain of families, Ryan is also accused of making
Bvictims of jurors and law enforcement officials by undermining their pursuits
of justice. Two law professors note Ryan’s disregard for the machinery of justice,
claiming that ‘‘Ryan’s decision to commute the death sentences of 167 (concededly
guilty) death row inmates reflects disrespect for the entire criminal justice system,
and is inconsistent with representative democracy.’’65 Michelle Stanze states that the
former governor ‘‘has made a mockery of the justice system and has delivered a firm
slap in the face to every victim of crime. He has also disregarded the integrity of every
man and woman who served on those juries.’’66 The entire system becomes a
Bvictim in this discourse.
Vincent Moreth articulates what he sees as the final insult of the Ryan saga: ‘‘Ryan
doesn’t have to look the victims’ families in the eyes and see the misery and suffering
they have been going through and will go through for the rest of their lives because of
his decision. George Ryan just goes on down the road and picks up his $178,000 per
year pension.’’67 According to Moreth, Ryan is out of touch with ordinary families,
who are joined with citizens under a common ideograph of purity: Bvictimhood.
It is this very ideograph that anti-death penalty activists enlisted materially in order
to support Ryan’s decision and challenge capital punishment.

Material BVictimhood in the Argument for Commutations and Abolition

When George Ryan decided to place a moratorium on executions in Illinois shortly
after entering the office of Governor, anti-death penalty activists recognized an
opportunity for a broad critique of capital punishment, as well as a chance to empty
Illinois’ death row.68 They also saw the importance of Bvictimhood in the context
of the Ryan commutations and readily invoked the ideograph. Such discourse
understands the death penalty and other expressions of the criminal justice systems as
reifications of capitalist hegemony whose oppressive implications for the poor and
ethnic minorities maintain an unequal distribution of resources and advance ruling
class interests.69 While such a rhetorical strategy does not avoid the emotion found in
pro-death penalty argumentation, it understands Bvictimhood as emerging from
physical, rather than affective lived experience, or complex and corrupt social
structures, rather than monolithically evil murderers and the corrupt George Ryan.70
I have chosen to focus on rhetoric emerging from anti-death penalty social
movements. While several letters to the editor following the commutations expressed
 392 B. J. McCann

support for the decision, I have emphasized texts from major speeches, websites, and
other materials from prominent figures and activist organizations associated with
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the commutations, because these voices are rarely heard in mainstream media.71
Contrasting mainstream and movement voices calls attention to the negotiation and
struggle between dominant media articulations of a therapeutic Bvictimhood and
the grassroots mobilization of a materialist discourse of Bvictimhood. I now turn
to the major articulations of material Bvictimhood.

BVictims of an Unjust System

The initial basis for George Ryan’s decision was the disproportionate number of those
exonerated on the basis of innocence versus those executed. In his speech announcing
the blanket commutations, Ryan argues, ‘‘There is not a doubt in my mind that the
number of innocent men freed from our Death Row stands at 17, with the pardons of
Aaron Patterson, Madison Hobley, Stanley Howard and Leroy Orange.’’ Ryan
mentions these men by name, clearly identifying them as embodied human
Bvictims of a broken system. In the same speech, the former Governor praised
his colleagues who ‘‘[spared] the lives and secured the freedom of 17 men*men who
were wrongfully convicted and rotting in the condemned units of our state prisons.’’72
Ryan uses vivid and stark imagery to express what was at stake in the midst of the
Illinois controversy. Real, living human beings were ‘‘rotting’’ on death row and stood
the risk of being unjustly exterminated by the state. While the former governor makes
appeals to emotions, Ryan’s invocation of Bvictimhood is not only or primarily
affective; rather, his rhetoric invokes the physical body of a person unjustly
condemned to die.
This positing of the condemned as embodied victims has become a common and
powerful argument in anti-death penalty discourse. Rhetoric focusing on the
conviction of innocent individuals is increasingly appealing to mainstream audiences,
constituting a material invocation of the Bvictim ideograph that locates its
engagement of capital punishment within the threatened extermination of an
innocent body.73 While such discourse avoids the affective disembodiment of the
pro-death penalty rendering of Bvictimhood, it is still politically unsatisfying
from a historical materialist perspective. In distinction from this articulation of
convicts as Bvictims, critics of the death penalty also used the Illinois
commutations as an opportunity to posit a Bvictimhood linked to unjust social
structures above and beyond the issue of innocence.74
In his speech at Northwestern University, Ryan describes the arbitrariness of capital
sentencing in Illinois, noting that
a killing with the same circumstances might get 40 years in one county and death in
another county. I have also seen co-defendants who are equally guilty where one
gets sentenced to a term of years, while another ends up on death row.75
Ryan identifies documented racial disparities in the administering of death sentences
when supporting his commutation decision, revealing that ‘‘Our own study showed
 Therapeutic and Material BVictimhood 393

that juries were more likely to sentence to death if the victim were white than if the
victim were black*three-and-a-half times more likely to be exact.’’76 Ryan also
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noted, ‘‘Of the more than 160 death row inmates, 35 were African American
defendants who had been convicted or condemned to die by all-white juries. More
than two-thirds of the inmates on death row were African American.’’77 For the
Governor, Illinois’ death row produced a Bvictimhood that was not personal or
simply embodied, but structural, as entire communities became Bvictims of a
broken system. Such a rendering posits individual agents as Bvictims of systemic
disparities derived from their location in marginalized populations.
Other supporters of the commutation identified broader systemic problems. In a
press release preceding the commutations, then-NAACP President Julian Bond
explained that ‘‘racial prejudice and human error can and do decide who lives or dies
[on death row].’’78 In its commentary following the commutations, the online
periodical Black Commentator welcomed Ryan’s commutations, but insisted that
The death penalty is a legacy of the enslavement of Africans and extermination of
Native Americans, an essential component of the racist American character. That’s
why the South excels in judicial murder, and the reason that half of death row
inmates are Black.79
Both of these commentaries, while lacking the individuation of other renderings of
Bvictimhood, locate anxieties about capital punishment within a national
tendency toward racial discrimination.
Such conceptualizations of capital punishment avoid the intimacy of therapeutic
Bvictimhood and privilege the experiences of entire groups of people and their
relationship to a system empowered to make life-and-death decisions. Marlene
Martin, the national director of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty (CEDP),
attempts to combine a systemic critique of the death penalty with a more intimate
representation of its implications in an article preceding the commutations. Invoking
her own experiences on regular visits to Illinois’ death row, Martin imagines what
Ryan would see if he visited any of the condemned. In describing a hypothetical visit
to the cell of admittedly guilty murderer Renaldo Hudson, Martin suggests that
‘‘Renaldo would talk about the factors that landed him on death row at the age of
19*his background of poverty and abuse growing up, his problem with drugs.’’80 She
continues by explaining that Ryan would spend his time ‘‘meeting people who face a
death sentence because they were too poor to afford a good attorney or they were an
easy target for racist police, or because a politically ambitious prosecutor needed a
conviction.’’81 Martin’s critique of capital punishment is not limited to innocence.
Instead, as the CEDP’s website attests, Martin understands the death penalty as a
violent expression of deeply rooted social disparities of wealth and racial
discrimination.82
The group Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation (MVFR) provided a
particularly provocative engagement of the Bvictim ideograph in the wake of the
commutations controversy. Vocally supportive of the Ryan commutations, MVFR
challenges the generalization that all victims’ families support the death penalty and
 394 B. J. McCann

find closure from it, while also providing a systemic critique of capital punishment.83
This approach exposes therapeutic Bvictimhood as inherently unsettled and
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unreliable as a means of arguing about the death penalty by challenging prevailing

assumptions about the desires of families, while also carefully outlining the ways in
which capital punishment creates material Bvictims due to its unfair and arbitrary
use. Groups such as MVFR constitute an important contribution to the negotiation
of the Bvictim ideograph as it successfully engages both therapeutic and material
renderings thereof.
Champions of the Illinois commutations invoked rhetorical strategies that spanned
a materialist spectrum. Their enlistment of the Bvictim ideograph supported their
claim that capital punishment not only harms the innocent, but also reifies broad
structural inequalities that make Bvictims of entire populations. The various
expressions of such discourse, as well as the affective renderings of Bvictimhood
espoused by death penalty supporters, carry with them a number of important
implications, to which I will now turn.

A Materialist Stance Toward BVictimhood

In the closing days of his term as governor, George Ryan sparked a renewed national
conversation about capital punishment. An analysis of letters to the editor, activist
rhetoric, and other commentary reveal a contentious battle over what counts as a
Bvictim. By enlisting the Bvictim ideograph, pro-death penalty rhetors
situated the death penalty within a discourse of healing, discouraging discussion of
the sanction’s troubling social dimensions. Activists’ material critique of the sanction
centralized those very issues by focusing on innocence, disparate sentencing, and
structural injustice.
When George Ryan cleared Illinois’ death row, public opinion in the state was
almost perfectly split, with just over 47 percent supporting and slightly more than 50
percent opposing the former Governor’s actions.84 This division occurred in spite
of a prevailing mainstream discourse of therapy with regards to the Bvictim
ideograph. Given the substantial support for Ryan’s decision in spite of such a
rhetorical imbalance, abolitionists and reformers should find the discursive environ-
ment in the wake of the Illinois commutations both encouraging and instructive.
Activists and scholars must be prepared to engage the issue of capital punishment
in a way that both exploits the rhetorical force of the Bvictim ideograph and
locates the fight against capital punishment within a broader movement against
injustice. A major variable in the appeal of a therapeutic Bvictimhood in the
context of the Illinois commutations was the way it constituted a broad scope of
Bvictimhood. This level of solidarity was significantly absent in the Bvictim
hood portrayed by Ryan and his mainstream supporters. The disproportionate and
individualistic emphasis on innocence in the Illinois controversy, as well as other
abolitionist rhetoric, risks succumbing to the very limitations of therapeutic rhetoric
by personalizing a necessarily social issue.
 Therapeutic and Material BVictimhood 395

While the profiles on websites like the Center on Wrongful Convictions, as well as
the rhetoric of George Ryan, display the inaccuracies of a broken justice system, the
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flaws are understood mainly in terms of inaccuracy, as opposed to the death penalty’s
role in reifying broader structural inequalities regardless of innocence or guilt.85 The
exonerated Illinois inmates are ultimately Bvictims of a system that must be fixed,
rather than eliminated. This is evident in the present political climate in Illinois,
where Governor Blagojevich and the legislature are engaging the issue of capital
punishment with the ultimate goal of lifting the moratorium.86 Moreover, outgoing
Virginia Governor Mark R. Warner recently ordered a DNA test on semen found at
the scene of a 1981 rape and murder for which the state executed Roger Coleman in
1992. Coleman insisted that he was innocent, and several abolitionist and reform
groups advocated for his cause, attracting a significant amount of mainstream media
attention. However, the DNA test confirmed Coleman’s guilt, resulting in what is now
widely regarded as a discrediting moment for the anti-death penalty movement. As
Warner stated, ‘‘The confirmation that Roger Coleman’s DNA was present reaffirms
the verdict and the sanction.’’87 These examples illustrate the limitations of a material
Bvictimhood that emphasizes innocence. While such rhetoric has significant
mainstream appeal, it ultimately affirms the validity of state killing to the extent that
those condemned are guilty of murder. Such discourse avoids a critique of capital
punishment that articulates the origins of crime and criminality within the broader
inequalities of a capitalist society.
This incident, however, should not prompt a complete abandonment of the
Bvictim ideograph or emotional rhetoric in general. Such rhetorical strategies are
provocative by virtue of their location within a liberal ideological context. Barbara
Koziak argues that, rather than completely dismissing the value of emotion in public
deliberation, rhetors should create new spaces in which the traumatic implications of
oppression can be affectively articulated.88 Abolitionists must work to link the
emotional appeal of the Bvictim ideograph to its broader structural realities. This
may include the continued enlistment of individuals who have had direct experience
with the death penalty, whether it is exonerated inmates or the families of those
presently on Death Row or already executed.89 Because these individuals are
disproportionately members of disadvantaged communities, such strategies can
have mainstream appeal while being referential to larger struggles. The violence of
capital punishment not only has heartbreaking implications, but also articulates, in a
particularly macabre fashion, the myriad forms of oppression that maintain
capitalism’s structures of exploitation.
Most importantly, however, anti-death penalty activists must construct a rhetoric
of material Bvictimhood grounded in solidarity among oppressed populations,
identifying capital punishment as the most violent expression of a criminal justice
system that consistently reproduces the stratifications that advance capitalist interests.
Therapeutic Bvictimhood is compelling and enduring because it fosters solidarity
among what Dana Cloud has described as an ‘‘affected public,’’ one ‘‘constructed in
terms of shared affect rather than shared interests or shared reasoning.’’90 Current
manifestations of material Bvictimhood can offer solidarity by grounding any
 396 B. J. McCann

affective discourse in lived material relations that encourage identification and

outrage on the basis of shared interest in the face of an unjust system.
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It is not a coincidence that the Furman v. Georgia decision of 1972, which abolished
capital punishment in the United States for four years, occurred in the midst of
massive moves toward racial, gender, and economic equality, an anti-war movement,
as well as a determined public interest in prison reform.91 This social context
encouraged citizens to recognize the connections between various expressions of
institutional power, as the disproportionate execution of black inmates became an
example of a Bvictimhood of broader inequalities.92 An abolitionist movement
that recognizes the ways in which the death penalty works against the shared material
interests of ordinary people is a movement powerful in its capacity to address the
origins of criminality in a capitalist society. The death penalty, while one of many
expressions of capitalism, carries with it a brutality and urgency that demands
nothing less than a normative framework capable of taking sides and drawing
connections between what takes place in the death chamber and the broader interests
it serves.

Notes
[1] Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz, ‘‘Illinois Governor Empties Death Row, Labels State’s System a
Catastrophic Failure,’’ The Boston Globe, 12 January 2003, A1.
[2] Report on the Commission of Capital Punishment, April 2002, http://www.idoc.state.il.us/ccp/
ccp/reports/commission_report/index.html (accessed 3 March 2005); Daniel C. Vock,
‘‘Justices Consider Legality of Death Row Commutations,’’ Chicago Daily Law Bulletin,
17 September 2003, 1.
[3] Dave McKinney and Shamus Toomey, ‘‘Ryan’s Clearing of Death Row Legal,’’ Chicago Sun-
Times, 24 January 2004, 2.
[4] Tim O’Neil, ‘‘Death Row Commutations Next Door Fire up Debate over Penalty in
Missouri,’’ St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri), 19 January 2003, B1.
[5] Reynolds Holding, ‘‘Historic Death Row Reprieve; Illinois: Gov. Ryan Spares 167, Ignites
National Debate,’’ The San Francisco Chronicle, 12 January 2003, A1.
[6] For information on corruption charges against Ryan, see Monica Davey and Gretchen
Ruethling, ‘‘Former Illinois Governor is Convicted in Graft Case,’’ The New York Times, 18
April 2006, 14. For an account of the legislature’s failure to adopt the recommended reforms,
see George H. Ryan, ‘‘Governor George H. Ryan’s Address,’’ Center on Wrongful Convictions,
11 January 2003, http://www.law.northwestern.edu/depts/clinic/wrongful/RyanSpeech.htm
(accessed 3 March 2005).
[7] Clare Howard, ‘‘Professor Nominates Former Illinois Governor for Nobel Prize,’’ Copley
News Service, 28 August 2004, http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe (accessed 6 March 2005);
Kevin McDermott, ‘‘Illinoisans are Split Closely on Ryan’s Commutations; Death Penalty has
More, Stronger Support in Missouri than Illinois, Poll Shows,’’ St. Louis Post-Dispatch
(Missouri), 7 February 2003, A1.
[8] Rob Olmstead, ‘‘Governor Signs Death Penalty Reforms, but Moratorium on Executions will
Remain in Effect, Blagojevich Says,’’ Chicago Daily Herald, 21 January 2004, 15. A recently
defeated proposal would have required that a jury have ‘‘no doubt’’ as to a defendant’s guilt
before imposing a death sentence. Melissa Jenco, ‘‘Doubts Defeat Death Penalty Plan,’’
Chicago Daily Herald, 19 May 2005, 15.
 Therapeutic and Material BVictimhood 397

[9] Bill Murphy, ‘‘Death Row: Status Quo; Texas Undeterred by Illinois’ Ripple Effects,’’ The
Houston Chronicle, 19 January 2003, 1.
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[10] The enclosure of terms in carats is the conventional notation style of ideograph analysis and
will be used throughout this study.
[11] For descriptions of historical materialism, see Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction
(London: Verso, 1991); Teresa Ebert, Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Desire, and
Labor in Late Capitalism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Friedrich Engels,
‘‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,’’ in Marxism: Essential Writings, ed. David McLellan
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 63; Karl Marx, ‘‘The Materialist Concept of
History,’’ in Marxism: Essential Writings, 319.
[12] Ebert, 7. Emphasis in original.
[13] For an excellent historical materialist analysis of the death penalty, see Eric Ruder, ‘‘Death
Penalty on Trial,’’ International Socialist Review 11 (2000), http://www.isreview.org/issues/11/
death_penalty.shtml (accessed 10 November 2006).
[14] For more on the question of judgment and poststructuralism, see Dana L. Cloud, ‘‘The
Materiality of Discourse as Oxymoron: A Challenge to Critical Rhetoric,’’ Western Journal of
Communication 58 (1994): 14163; Cloud, Stephen Macek, and James Arnt Aune, ‘‘ ‘The
Limbo of Ethical Simulacra’: A Reply to Ron Greene,’’ Philosophy and Rhetoric 39 (2006): 72
84; Cloud, ‘‘The Matrix and Critical Theory’s Desertion of the Real,’’ Communication and
Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (2006): 32954; Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic
Books, 2003).
[15] Austin Sarat, When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 247.
[16] Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2003); Helen Prejean, The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful
Executions (New York: Random House, 2005); Sarat.
[17] I took these letters from the following regional newspapers: The Chicago Tribune (Chicago),
The Chicago Sun-Times (Chicago), The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis), and The State
Journal-Register (Springfield). These publications were selected to achieve a wide regional
representation of Illinois attitudes on the issue of capital punishment and George Ryan’s
commutations. The Tribune and Sun-Times are Chicago’s major Metro papers with wide
readerships. The Tribune is also a nationally distributed paper, reporting Illinois politics to
the rest of the country. The Post-Dispatch is also a major paper with wide state (especially
southern) readership. Furthermore, the Journal-Register is published in the Illinois State
capital, meaning that it is situated at the epicenter of state policy. While this sample size may
initially seem small, it should be noted that the Ryan commutations came in the midst of
the prelude to the invasion of Iraq, the Michigan State University Affirmative Action
controversy, and President Bush’s decision about federal funding for stem cell research.
Consequentially, publication for letters to the editor, especially for the high-circulation
Chicago Tribune, was highly competitive.
[18] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books,
1977), 304.
[19] John M. Sloop, The Cultural Prison: Discourse, Prisoners, and Punishment (Tuscaloosa: The
University of Alabama Press, 1996), 3.
[20] In The History of Sexuality, Foucault abandons the traditional Marxist theorizing of an
economic basis for all power relationships, encouraging activists and scholars to focus on
localized struggles rather than ‘‘universals.’’ Various discourses of struggle may intersect from
time-to-time but are not necessarily bound to one another. See Foucault, History of Sexuality,
An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1980); ‘‘Truth and Power,’’ in The Essential Foucault:
Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 19541984, ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose
(New York: The New Press, 1994), 30018. Scholars such as Kevin DeLuca and Ronald
Greene claim that rhetoric’s constitutive function gives it materiality by virtue of its ability to
 398 B. J. McCann

locate an individual within a social structure. Rather than being interested in questions of
objective relations, such critics seek to understand phenomena as they are publicly contested,
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as such negotiations determine how publics experience race, gender, and other discourses.
These scholars reject the traditional Marxist privileging of class as a basis for social struggle,
arguing that the fight for hegemony occurs on the surface of various independent ‘‘nodal
points.’’ See Kevin Michael DeLuca, Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental
Activism (New York: The Guilford Press, 1999); Ronald Walter Greene, ‘‘Rhetoric and
Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor,’’ Philosophy and Rhetoric 37 (2004):
188206; Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed., (London: Verso, 2001).
[21] See Amnesty International, United States of America: Death by Discrimination: The
Continuing Role of Race in Capital Cases (2003), http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/
engamr510462003 (accessed 2 March 2004; Michael K. Brown, Martin Carnoy, Elliot Currie,
Troy Duster, David B. Oppenheimer, Marjorie Schultz, and David Wellman, Whitewashing
Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003);
‘‘Death Penalty Representation,’’ Death Penalty Information Center, 2006, online at http://
www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?did896&scid68 (accessed 12 October 2005).
[22] Michael Calvin McGee, ‘‘The ‘Ideograph’: A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology,’’ The
Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 5.
[23] Ibid, 6.
[24] See, for example, Cloud, ‘‘The Rhetoric of Family Values: Scapegoating, Utopia, the
Privatization of Social Responsibility,’’ Western Journal of Communication 62 (1998):
387419; Celeste M. Condit, ‘‘The Contemporary American Abortion Controversy: Stages
in the Argument,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 7 (1984): 41024; Condit and John L. Lucaites,
Crafting Equality: America’s Anglo-African Word (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1993).
[25] Condit and Lucaites, xiii.
[26] Cloud.
[27] Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973).
[28] Charles J. Sykes, A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1992), 1112. While I disagree with Syke’s conservative conclusions about
Bvictim ideology, his writing is nonetheless instructive in understanding the Bvictim
as an ideograph in American culture and politics.
[29] Foucault; Sarat.
[30] C.L. Ten, Crime, Guilt and Punishment: A Philosophical Introduction (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1987).
[31] Markus Dirk Dubber, Victims in the War on Crime: The Use and Abuse of Victims’ Rights
(New York: New York University Press, 2002); Carrie A. Rentschler, The Victims Rights
Movement and Anti-Crime Politics (paper presented at the annual meeting for the National
Communication Association, Chicago, November, 2004); Jennifer K. Wood, ‘‘‘In Whose
Name’: Crime Victim Policy and the Punishing Power of Protection,’’ National Women’s
Studies Association Journal 17 (2005): 117.
[32] Robert Elias, The Politics of Victimization: Victims, Victimology, and Human Rights (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
[33] Wood, ‘‘Refined Raw: The Symbolic Violence of Victims’ Rights Reforms,’’ College Literature
26 (1999): 15069; Lynne N. Henderson, ‘‘The Wrongs of Victims’ Rights,’’ Stanford Law
Review 37, issue 937 (1985), http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe (accessed 11 March 2004).
[34] Dubber.
[35] Cloud, Control and Consolation in American Culture and Politics: Rhetorics of Therapy
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), xiii.
[36] Ibid., 2728.
 Therapeutic and Material BVictimhood 399

[37] Ibid., 1617.

[38] Theodore Hamm, Rebel and a Cause: Caryl Chessman and the Politics of the death Penalty in
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Postwar California, 19481974 (Berkeley: University of California Press).

[39] Wood, ‘‘Justice as Therapy: The Victim Rights Clarification Act,’’ Communication Quarterly
51 (2003): 2967.
[40] Sarat.
[41] Cloud, ‘‘Therapy, Silence, and War: Consolation and the End of Deliberation in the ‘Affected’
Public,’’ Poroi 2 (2003), http://inpress.lib.uiowa.edu/poroi/papers/cloud030816.html#a2
(accessed 12 October 2005).
[42] ‘‘Death Interrupted: Gov. Ryan Makes a Dramatic Gesture as he Leaves Office,’’ Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette, 20 January 2003, A-10.
[43] McDermot.
[44] Dianne Atkinson Hudson (Executive Producer), The Oprah Winfrey Show (Chicago: Harpo
Productions, 16 January 2003), Television transcript, 7.
[45] Ibid, 1.
[46] Lucio Guerrero, ‘‘Prosecutors, Survivors Rip Ryan,’’ Chicago Sun-Times, 13 January 2003, 7.
[47] Ibid.
[48] Ibid.
[49] ‘‘Letters, Faxes, & E-mail,’’ The State Journal-Register, 21 January 2003, 4.
[50] ‘‘Letters to the Editor: Careful System of Justice is Thwarted,’’ St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
16 January 2003, B6.
[51] Joseph Napolitano, ‘‘Killing in Illinois,’’ Chicago Tribune, 14 January 2003, 22.
[52] ‘‘Letters, Faxes, & E-mails,’’ State Journal-Register, 13 January 2003, 6.
[53] ‘‘Letters to the Editor: One Man Overturns the Court System,’’ St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
14 January 2003, B6.
[54] ‘‘Letters, Faxes, & E-mails’’ The State Journal-Register, 15 January 2003, 6.
[55] ‘‘Letters, Faxes, & E-mails,’’ State Journal-Register, 14 January 2003, 7.
[56] Ibid.
[57] ‘‘Letters, Faxes, & E-mails,’’ State Journal-Register, 15 January 2003. Italics added.
[58] ‘‘Letters, Faxes, & E-mails,’’ State Journal-Register, 14 January 2003, 7.
[59] Ibid.
[60] ‘‘Letters to the Editor: Careful System of Justice is Thwarted.’’ Emphasis added.
[61] ‘‘Letters to the Editor: One Man Overturns the Court System.’’
[62] Phil Grimes, ‘‘Justice Denied,’’ Chicago Tribune, 14 January 2003, 22.
[63] ‘‘Letters to the Editor: Careful System of Justice is Thwarted.’’
[64] ‘‘Letters to the Editor: Where’s the Justice in Mass Commutation?,’’ St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
19 January 2003, B2.
[65] ‘‘Letters to the Editor,’’ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 23 January 2003, B6.
[66] ‘‘Letters to the Editor: Careful System of Justice Thwarted.’’
[67] ‘‘Letters, Faxes, & E-mails,’’ The State Journal-Register, 15 January, 2003.
[68] Shu Shin Luh, ‘‘Death Penalty Opponents Rally in City Amid Optimism,’’ Chicago Sun-
Times, 11 June 2000, 25.
[69] For excellent explanations of the socio-economic implications of capital punishment and
other penal institutions, see Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass
Imprisonment, ed. Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind (New York: New Press, 2002);
Christian Parenti, ‘‘The ‘New’ Criminal Justice System: State Repression from 19682001,’’
Monthly Review 53 (2001): 1928; Ruder; Eric Schlosser, ‘‘The Prison Industrial Complex,’’
The Atlantic Monthly, December 1998, 5177; Randall G. Shelden and William B. Brown,
‘‘The Crime Control Industry and the Management of the Surplus Population,’’ Critical
Criminology 9 (2000): 3962.
[70] This discussion of a material Bvictim should not suggest that more therapeutic rhetorics
were not present in pro-Ryan rhetoric. For example, Archbishop Desmond Tutu argued that
 400 B. J. McCann

‘‘To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, it is not justice. Justice allows for mercy,
for clemency, for compassion.’’ Such claims are not concerned about oppressive social
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structures, but instead privilege a more ineffable morality in challenging the apparatus of
capital punishment. Desmond M. Tutu, ‘‘A Letter from Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu,’’
Center on Wrongful Convictions, 3 January 2003, http://www.law.northwestern.edu/depts/
clinic/wrongful/documents/TutuLet.htm (accessed 11 September 2005). See also, Jesse L.
Jackson, Sr., ‘‘Open Letter to Governor Ryan,’’ Center on Wrongful Convictions, 31 December
2003, http://www.law.northwestern.edu/depts/clinic/wrongful/documents/RevJacksonLet.pdf
(accessed 11 September 2005). For letters to the editor invoking an affective moral theme, see
‘‘Letters, Faxes & E-Mail,’’ Chicago Sun-Times, 30 January 2003, 6; Stevens, David L. ‘‘Kudos
to Ryan for his Stand.’’ The State Journal-Register, 14 January 2003, 7.
[71] Representative letters in favor of the commutations include ones written by Timothy W.
Crook, Rod and Shelly Hughes, and Rich Schutz. ‘‘Letters, Faxes, & E-mails,’’ The State
Journal-Register, 2 February 2003, 20; ‘‘Letters, Faxes, & E-mails,’’ The State Journal-Register,
14 January 2003, 7; ‘‘Bring Back Lake Street Bus for West Side,’’ Chicago Sun-Times,
12 January 2003, 30.
[72] Ryan.
[73] A few examples: Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, the organiza-
tion that prompted Ryan’s investigation, details the troubled road that led these individuals
to death row, recounting the various injustices which secured the wrongful convictions and
death sentences. A recent moratorium in New Jersey rested upon arguments regarding
innocence. Sister Helen Prejean’s The Death of Innocents documents two executions that were
carried out against what she believed to be innocent men. The American Broadcasting
Company has launched the television series In Justice, a fictionalized account of a non-profit
law agency that investigates cases of wrongful convictions. This show follows the successful
play and television movie The Exonerated, which consisted of monologues by former Death
Row inmates.
[74] Teresa Ebert distinguishes a materialism of embodiment from historical materialism
emphasizing the location of bodies in structured social relations of capitalism (see p. 33).
See Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley, Rhetorical Bodies (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1999) for essays about the significance of embodiment to rhetoric.
[75] Ryan.
[76] Ibid.
[77] Ibid.
[78] ‘‘Illinois Governor Ryan Congratulated on Death Row Pardonss [sic]: Ryan’s Actions Called
Direct Contrast to Incoming Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich,’’ National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People, 11 January 2003, http://www.naacp.org/news/2003/
2003-01-11.html (accessed 11 June 2006).
[79] ‘‘The Issues,’’ The Black Commentator, 16 January 2003, http://www.blackcommentator.
com/25/25_issues.html (accessed 11 June 2006).
[80] Marlene Martin, ‘‘The Real Face of Death Row: A Look Inside Illinois’ Broken Death Penalty
System,’’ Socialist Worker, 5 April 2002, http://www.socialistworker.org/2002-1/401/
401_05_FaceOfDeathRow.shtml (accessed 13 June 2006).
[81] Ibid.
[82] The CEDP intentionally avoids ‘‘moralistic’’ arguments against capital punishment, focusing
instead on ‘‘Five Reasons’’: The death penalty is racist, it punishes the poor, it sentences the
innocent to die, it does not deter crime, and it is cruel and unusual. For more information,
see http://www.nodeathpenalty.org (accessed 13 June 2006).
[83] ‘‘‘Victims’ Voices’: Chicago Event to Highlight Murder Victims’ Family Members who Favor
Clemency,’’ Death Penalty Information Center, 3 December 2002, http://www.deathpenalty
info.org/article.php?scid1&did278 (available 13 June 2006). See MVFR online at http://
www.mvfr.org/index.htm (accessed 13 June 2006). The website for a similar group, Murder
 Therapeutic and Material BVictimhood 401

Victims’ Families for Human Rights, can be found at http://www.willsworld.com/mvfhr/

(accessed 13 June 2006).
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[84] ‘‘Illinois Voters Evenly Split Over Governor’s Commutations,’’ Death Penalty Information
Center, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid23&did210#Illinois (accessed
13 June 2006).
[85] Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions claims that, after the 1976 Gregg
v. Georgia decision restored capital punishment in the US, at least 38 executions have
occurred ‘‘in face of compelling evidence of innocence or serious doubt about guilt.’’ See
‘‘Executions of Possibly Innocent Persons,’’ Center on Wrongful Convictions, 11 March 2004,
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/depts/clinic/wrongful/executingtheinnocent.htm (accessed
13 June 2006). Since 1973, 123 innocent people have been exonerated from death row. See
‘‘Innocence: List of Those Freed from Death Row,’’ Death Penalty Information Center, 2006,
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid6&did110 (accessed 13 June 2006).
[86] Olmstead; Jenco.
[87] Maria Glod and Michael D. Shear, ‘‘DNA Tests Confirm Guilt of Executed Man,’’ Washington
Post, 13 January 2006, A01.
[88] Barbara Koziak, Retrieving Political Emotion (University Park: Penn State University Press,
2000).
[89] For example, see the CEDP’s National Speakers Bureau online at http://www.nodeathpe
nalty.org/speakers.html (accessed 13 June 2006).
[90] Cloud, ‘‘Therapy, Silence, and War: Consolation and the End of Deliberation in the ‘Affected’
Public,’’ ’12. Emphasis in original.
[91] Herbert H. Haines, Against Capital Punishment: The Anti-Death Penalty Movement in
America, 19721994 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Craig Haney, Reforming
Punishment (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2006); ‘‘Prisoners’
Rights: An Introduction,’’ in Cases and Materials on the Law of Sentencing, Corrections,
and Prisoners’ Rights, 5th ed., ed. Lynn Branham and Sheldon Krantz (St. Paul, MN: West,
1997), 27886.
[92] Banner.