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From the late 19th through the 20th century, scientists, legislators, and other policy makers in modernizingA" societies increasingly turned to formal classification schemes to define and devise solutions for complex social problems. In her exploration of a specific classificatory system - the death penalty in the United States - the author offers a rich ethnographic study of how the parties involved in making, administering, and responding to the forty death penalty classification schemes form such concepts and how they learn and use the resulting categories. When practices are devised by relying on formal classification schemes to define and solve problems, the results are controlling processes that Bruce Lincoln terms taxonomic tyranny,A" and Pierre Bourdieu identifies as the stake in all political, economic, and social games. This study contributes to an understanding of why that stake is all too often driven into the heart of targets for reasons that mystify both those that drive the stake and those it kills.