ABSTRACT

In 1954, 17 jurisdictions in the United States still had the sanction of civil death on their books. The disability which came to the United States under English common law, and which gained its own independent existence after the outlawing of attainder in the constitution, seems to have been beset by translation and transferability problems from the very start. The meaning, origins and material effects of the sanction were argued and debated in American state courts throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. In Britain, civil death came as a consequence of attainder or entry into a religious order and seems to have reached its highpoint in the 15th and 16th centuries (Lander 1961). Yet transported across the Atlantic and grafted on to the statutes of the new democratic states it became a wholly different legal instrument intimately connected to the penal imaginary and the legitimation of state punishment (Smith 2009).