Behind the gallows: Capital punishment, law, and legislative performance in Turkey (1926-1990)

This dissertation examines how the death penalty's legal framework and the practice of deciding on executions operated within Turkey's parliamentary era. The legislature, vested with broad power ranging from enacting capital laws to granting amnesty, played a central role in the operation of the death penalty while these laws were in effect. Analysis of parliamentary processes reveals that the death penalty functions as a distraction beyond the criminal and legal boundaries. Actors partly responsible for shaping, tolerating, or ignoring the normative order enabling crime, or for the legal inertia that fails to prevent it, deflect attention by emphasizing brutal death penalty de-bates, thus concealing or shifting their responsibility. Three notable parliamentary practices emerged. First, interpretations of death penalty legislation created a myth of monsters deserving death, which over-individualizes crime and deflects responsibility onto others. Second, the legislature acted in si-lence, presenting itself not as a decisive authority but as a mere cog in a ma-chine. Indeed, 80.6% of individual death sentences were processed without parliamentary debate, and for thirty-five years, none were placed on the agenda. Political elites, neither accepting nor rejecting executions, strategically preserve the death penalty laws by leveraging its capacity to absorb every debate into its moral sphere. Third, the death penalty's legal existence hid individual responsibility by portraying victim as abstract entity – the state or nation. It obscured how and why those positioned at the fringes or in opposition to the socio-political order were placed there in the first place, by designating them as the other.