Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada officially abolished capital punishment in 1976. For the last few years, however, our federal government has been adopting increasingly harsher penal policies that resemble American law-and-order politics. As punishments increase in severity, there is pressure to add harsher penalties at the ‘top’ of the scale, that is, for heinous killing. Members of the federal government are almost exclusively pro-death penalty, so it seems the possibility for reinstatement is real. If the death penalty were proposed it would very likely follow on the heels of a shocking crime, and the discourse surrounding the debate will be one that exploits the emotionality of crime and punishment. In this vein, state killing will present not as a rational response to rule violation but as a necessary ritual to combat a metaphysical form of evil. The purpose of this paper is to examine the ritualistic aspects of state killing as practised in the US today, with a view to deepening our understanding of the punishment’s popular appeal so that we can more effectively resist reinstitution or, where capital punishment exists, fight for its abolition. The paper focuses on three aspects of death penalty procedure – the detailed reporting of the offender’s final countdown and last meal, and the presence of clergy – to illustrate the connections between concrete practices of state killing and existing transcendental fixtures.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".