In Cold Blood, the Expansion of Psychiatric Evidence, and the Corrective Power of True Crime

This paper studies Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (serialized 1965, published 1966) in the context of the evidence-exclusion procedures that were central to the due process revolution in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that Capote's text owes its canonicity in part to its mediation between legal procedure's exclusion of inculpatory evidence (an aesthetic of curtailment) and literature's inclusion of exculpatory evidence (an aesthetic of expansion). I conclude that legal procedurals such as In Cold Blood re-stage the conflict between these aesthetic frameworks, such that true-crime narratives are frequently figured as both testaments and correctives to the original legal trial.