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The People of California vs. Juan de Dios Ramírez Villa
Murray, Yxta Maya
Murray, Yxta Maya
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Abstract
James Boyd White’s 1972 book The Legal Imagination announced that
law and literature are disciplines that share imaginative and intellectual
commitments. He also presented them as good, if quarrelsome, partners in
legal education and the development of a humane legal system. Inspired by
White’s vision and audacity, I set forth an extended literary analysis of a
1997 California death penalty case. This exercise contemplates the
relationship between the legal opinion and the essay, considering them not
only cousins but also antagonists whose differences consist in their relative
abilities to wander. The rules that limit the legal opinion do not fetter the
essayist, and here I take that opportunity to more fully imagine the scenes
and arrogations that led to the murder of a seventeen-year-old boy in the
mid-1990s and to contemplate that killing’s presence in a larger political
and ecological landscape. The most pressing and literally questing
inquiries this essay divulges concern the roles that the oil and pesticide
industries played in a young man’s death, another man’s life sentence, and
the criminal justice system generally.