The Electronic Pillory: Social Time and Hostility Toward Capital Murderers

• Date: 01 September 2015
• Published date: 01 September 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12151

The Electronic Pillory: Social Time and Hostility

Toward Capital Murderers

Scott Phillips Mark Cooney

In early modern Europe, popular hostility toward criminals could be

expressed through the use of the pillory (a device in which offenders were

restrained and publicly displayed). Modern electronic communications have

facilitated the emergence of contemporary versions of the pillory. One such

example is prodeathpenalty.com, a Web site created by supporters of capital

punishment that permits members to post comments about particular execu-

tions. Most such comments are markedly hostile toward the convicted

offender. But is the hostility random or patterned? A new theory by Donald

Black predicts that hostility will increase with changes in social space, or the

movement of social time. Testing Black’s theory, we find that the number of

online comments hostile to the killer and supportive of the execution

increases with the degree to which the murder was a movement of relational,

vertical, and cultural time. Moving beyond the electronic pillory, we argue

that Black’s theory has much to offer to law and society scholars.

From time immemorial, people have criticized, mocked, and

excoriated deviants. Popular sanctions of that kind appear to

have been particularly prominent before the Industrial Revolu-

tion. In early modern England, for instance, “villagers, acting

communally, might take it upon themselves to punish those con-

sidered guilty of anti-social or immoral conduct” (Durston 2004:

313). Popular punishments included charivari or skimmington (a

noisy parade designed to humiliate a deviant), carting (being

paraded publicly in a cart), and ducking stools (confinement in a

chair that is plunged into water). A sanction that combined popu-

lar and legal components was the pillory—when a criminal “was

made to undergo a form of public penance by being exhibited on

a platform with his hands and head fixed in a wooden structure”

(Beattie 1986: 464). Members of the community could respond

to the offender with praise, indifference, or, more usually,

For providing comments on an earlier draft, we thank Donald Black, Bradley Camp-

bell, Jared Del Rosso, Mike Radelet, the anonymous reviewers, and the editors. We would

also like to thank the Nancy Maron Fund for providing generous financial support for the

research. Please direct all correspondence to Scott Phillips, Department of Sociology and

Criminology, University of Denver, 2000 E. Asbury Avenue, Denver, CO 80208; e-mail:

Scott.Phillips@du.edu.

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C2015 Law and Society Association. All rights reserved.

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hostility—by jeering or bombarding him or her with rotten vege-

tables or other matter, thereby drawing wider attention to the

offense and humiliating the offender (see, e.g., Greene 2003).

Over time, popular sanctions of this kind increasingly gave way

to state sanctions administered by legal officials. Popular justice

never disappeared, but it assumed less public prominence. Scholar-

ship reflects the general trend. The conduct of police, prosecutors,

attorneys, judges, juries, and other legal officials has been studied

in considerable detail. By contrast, the sanctions that non-state

actors continue to inflict on one another has attracted much less

interest (but see, e.g., Baumgartner 1988; Morrill 1995; Senechal

de la Roche 2004).

1

Moreover, when popular justice is scrutinized

it often focuses on those occasions when informal sanctions are

used instead of law: if business people or rural country neighbors

do not sue when they have legal rights to do so, how do they man-

age their conflicts (e.g., Ellickson 1991; Macaulay 1963)? Some-

times, however, law and popular justice are found together (e.g.,

Manza and Uggen 2006; Pager 2007). And sometimes they are

both applied to the very same act. For instance, in a murder case

the killer might be arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced by the legal

system while also being castigated and shunned by the community.

In such cases, the legal sanctions are recorded and publicly accessi-

ble but the popular penalties have tended to remain private,

known only to those directly involved.

The growth of mass means of communication has provided

new outlets for popular justice. Radio, television, film, and, espe-

cially, news media enhanced the ability of ordinary citizens to

have their say about wrongful behavior. But no medium has

boosted it more than the internet. The internet allows more peo-

ple to participate in more moral controversies and do so faster

than ever before. Consequently, many disputes between individu-

als, groups, and countries now originate online; others migrate

there, wholly or in part. People have expanded opportunities to

support or oppose general moral causes (e.g., human, animal

rights) or to weigh in on particular moral controversies (e.g., the

guilt/innocence of defendants in well-known trials). Information

about moral events can be disseminated far and wide allowing

people to become familiar with the details of arrests, assassina-

tions, riots, massacres, and other manifestations of conflict—even

those occurring in distant lands. Since much e-control is either

publicly or semipublicly accessible, it can provide researchers

1

One tradition in legal sociology treats both law and popular justice as aspects of legal

pluralism (see, e.g., Griffiths 1986; Merry 1988). Given the marked contrast in severity and

otherwise between the death penalty and the online criticism we address here, we find it

useful to distinguish the two forms.

726 The Electronic Pillory

with data previously difficult to uncover. Yet with the exception

of online bullying, relatively little is known about this new phase

of popular justice. In particular, it is unclear whether the ano-

nymity of much electronic social control results in it obeying dif-

ferent principles to traditional social control.

Prodeathpenalty.com is an online moral community com-

posed of supporters of the death penalty. Among other things,

the Web site provides members with a forum for expressing

anonymous opinions about executions. Most of the comments are

highly critical of the condemned prisoner. This electronic pillory

provides naturally occurring data regarding hostility toward con-

victed murderers. But are such hostile comments equally distrib-

uted across cases? Or do some offenders attract more than

others? To answer the question and redress the relative deficit of

research on popular justice, we examine hostile comments

directed at 149 offenders executed in Texas from 2005 to 2012.

The Web site postings also reveal variation in support for par-

ticular executions, as indicated by hostility toward the con-

demned prisoner. Scholarship on support for the death penalty

has largely focused on the social and psychological characteristics

of supporters (see, e.g., Boots and Cochran 2011; Unnever and

Cullen 2012). The comments posted to prodeathpenalty.com

allow us to address a different question: Among those who favor

the death penalty, is support greater in some instances than

others?

2

Most importantly, the data afford an opportunity to test an

ambitious new theory of conflict developed by Donald Black

(2011). Black’s theory posits that the fundamental cause of con-

flict is the movement of social time. Social time is the fluctuation

of social space—the dynamic aspect of social life. As people’s for-

tunes rise or fall, as they form new or dissolve old relationships,

or as they encounter or reject cultural diversity, conflicts emerge.

But movements of social time vary in magnitude: larger and

faster movements cause more conflict.

Black’s theory has been applied to explicate the causes of

three forms of violence: genocide, family honor killing, and sui-

cide (Campbell 2013; Cooney 2014; Manning 2015). However, it

has not yet been tested in the context of nonviolent popular

2

The social control on prodeathpenalty.com is what rational choice theorists call

higher-order social control—a response to the punishment that responds to the killing

(Axelrod 1986; Horne 2009). Higher-order social control is not, in itself, unusual. Since

many crimes are themselves responses to deviance (Black 1983), much legal punishment is

higher-order social control. What makes the e-community’s higher-order control different

is that it is an unofficial or popular response to the legal punishment (rather than, as is more

common, a legal response to a popular punishment or a popular response to a popular

punishment).

Phillips & Cooney 727