This article focuses on the controversial ‘We on death row’
campaign launched by Benetton in January 2000. The campaign featured photographic
images of prisoners from death rows in the USA. The campaign, which has been
dismissed by Austin Sarat as an old and failing abolitionist strategy, poses a
number of challenges for our understanding and assessments of the potential
‘reformist’ efficacy of representations of punishment. The
article sets out to explore the ways of seeing and strategies of knowing the death
penalty in the USA and the contingent and unpredictable consequences of local ways
of seeing and strategies of knowing of these global spectacles of punishment. It
argues that despite the effectiveness of the cultural policing of representations of
the death penalty in the USA the Benetton campaign allowed a
‘witnessing’, a seeing through the pretences behind the
sanctioning of the death penalty at a moment which may prove resistant to the
normalization of disturbing images of punishment - the liminal state of death row.
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