“A Contest of Probabilities”: The Construction of Affordances in Lethal Injection Discourse

Questions over the inherent uncertainty about the capabilities and qualities of objects are frequently the central gravitational force that social discourses converge around. One such example is the legal debate over capital punishment, and the execution method of lethal injection specifically. Within legal disputes over whether certain lethal drugs used in executions constitute cruel and unusual punishment, lawyers representing both the State and those on death row use uncertainty to stake their own claims about what pieces of evidence do or do not mean. Through a qualitative content analysis of the briefs filed in Glossip v. Gross at the United States District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma, this research aims to answer the following overarching questions. First, how do legal actors use uncertainty to make claims about lethal injection drugs (LIDs)? Regarding LIDs as objects whose material qualities are themselves uncertain, what work do legal actors do to assert the existence of specific affordances? Finally, how do actors within legal discourses draw upon different forms of knowledge to make truth claims about things that are uncertain? This research is centered on the in-between space that links information and conclusion; the distance between known and unknown, and the work actors do in an attempt to resolve — or strategically not resolve — uncertainty. In my analysis, I find that the opposing parties leveraged uncertainty in similar ways, but for different interpretive ends. My research makes contributions to literature on the materiality of objects and the production of knowledge by giving attention to the work actors do to construct affordances based on ambiguous and/or limited information.