ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author investigates how the consciousness of ordinary citizens enlisted as jurors in death penalty trials is racialized. He focuses on research in legal consciousness theory by demonstrating how law as hegemonic narratives is mobilized and resisted at the intersection of the identities of both the punisher and the punished. The author scrutinizes jurors' responses in the context of his prior theoretical expectations regarding hegemony, identity, and legal consciousness, the more the features of discourse "jumped out" at him. White jurors were asked to reflect on the defendant they had sentenced to death. Studies of capital jurors find that white male juries are disproportionately far more likely to impose the death sentence when the defendant is black and the victim is white. The stories reveal a hegemonic narrative of racial inferiority and white superiority or supremacy. The African Americans in the study challenge the racial inferiority tales of their fellow white jurors.
