Arizona Quarterly Volume 80, Number 1, Spring 2024 • issn 0004-1610 Copyright © 2024 by Arizona Board of Regents Joe Lockard US Death Row Literature and Public Mobilization against Capital Punishment The paper introduces a question of how narrative studies can contribute to abolition of the death penalty in the United States. A second section maps a history of Death Row narratives from incarcerated people and witness memoirs, including early Amer- ican narratives, Sacco and Vanzetti, Caryl Chessman, and con- temporary writers such as Albert Woodfox. This historicization lays foundation for treating Death Row literature as a coherent witness genre. A third theoretical section argues that the major work of narratives opposed to the death penalty lies in human- ization of condemned prisoners and assertion of a human right to life, yet this is an insufficient and flawed argument. Death Row literature from incarcerated people represents an inherent claim on citizenship and protection of a right to life, not senti- mentalism. The paper closes by arguing that to have credibility and effect, writing from observers outside prisons demands an encircling link between witness and activism. A bolition of capital punishment is perhaps the lon- gest and slowest social reform movement in United States history. Opposition to capital punishment inspired by the eighteenth-century Italian social philosopher and penologist Cesare Beccaria began in the late eighteenth century (Beccaria 48–53), attracting reformers such as the noted Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush (Masur 62–70), James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and others. This initial wave of opposition grounded their arguments in republican anti-monarchism, associating execution with monarchical abuses, and in rejection of Cal- vinist theology with its insistence on immutable human depravity and advocacy of harsh punishments. Civic republicanism and theological