Killing Justice in the Lone Star State

Killing Justice in the Lone Star State PDF Author: Michael O'Brien
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781909976948
Category : Death row
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Killing Justice in the Lone Star State is a reality check on active Death Row cases (and some post-execution ones).

Killing Justice in the Lone Star State

Killing Justice in the Lone Star State PDF Author: Michael O'Brien
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781909976948
Category : Death row
Languages : en
Pages : 195

Get Book

Book Description
Killing Justice in the Lone Star State is a reality check on active Death Row cases (and some post-execution ones).

Killing Justice in the Lone Star State

Killing Justice in the Lone Star State PDF Author: Michael O’Brien
Publisher: Waterside Press
ISBN: 190997692X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Killing Justice in the Lone Star State is a reality check on active Death Row cases (and some post-execution ones). The book offers a fresh perspective for campaigners and reformers which ranges across theory, policy and practice. It also explains the much criticised Texas ‘law of parties.’ ‘A must read, an excellent new book by Mike O’Brien... A powerful critique... a critical comparative analysis of USA/UK human rights standards. Packed with cases. A compelling case for abolition.’-- Dr Michael Naughton, Bristol University, Empowering the Innocent Project. Many organizations are engaged in a race to prevent the execution of death sentenced prisoners in Texas (and elsewhere in the USA). Some men and women on Death Row claim to be completely innocent as described in this book. Michael O’Brien — who was himself wrongly convicted of murder — dissects cases with the eye of someone who has spent years watching how miscarriages of justice happen and why. He explains how practitioners and others are in denial and tunnel vision helps to sustain politicians, livelihoods and profits that depend on a conveyor belt from the courts to the execution chamber. He describes a killing process aided by bias, discrimination, prejudice, unfair trials, supposed expert evidence and closed minds. This is just one hallmark of a country obsessed with guns, violence and the ultimate penalty. Texas is the most punitive place within one of the harshest penal systems in the world. But no legal system should take away human lives, especially one tarnished by defects of the kind the author sets out in this book. Extract ‘Can you just imagine being an individual who is innocent but facing execution, whether in Texas or elsewhere? Or you were on Death Row but you did not take part in any killings, just got caught up in the hysteria? Can you picture the pressure and abject loneliness of serving 15 years or more, and then the State setting a date to kill you?’

Lone Star Justice

Lone Star Justice PDF Author: David M. Horton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781571682260
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
Drawn from a broad range of historical, political, and statutory sources, the authors combine a host of factual and historical information about the criminal justice system in Texas. This volume also contains an extensive glossary of general and Texas-specific terms, as well as a description of important and valuable Internet sites.

The Trials of Eroy Brown

The Trials of Eroy Brown PDF Author: Michael Berryhill
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292726945
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
In April 1981, two white Texas prison officials died at the hands of a black inmate at the Ellis prison farm near Huntsville. Warden Wallace Pack and farm manager Billy Moore were the highest-ranking Texas prison officials ever to die in the line of duty. The warden was drowned face down in a ditch. The farm manager was shot once in the head with the warden's gun. The man who admitted to killing them, a burglar and robber named Eroy Brown, surrendered meekly, claiming self-defense. In any other era of Texas prison history, Brown's fate would have seemed certain: execution. But in 1980, federal judge William Wayne Justice had issued a sweeping civil rights ruling in which he found that prison officials had systematically and often brutally violated the rights of Texas inmates. In the light of that landmark prison civil rights case, Ruiz v. Estelle, Brown had a chance of being believed. The Trials of Eroy Brown, the first book devoted to Brown's astonishing defense, is based on trial documents, exhibits, and journalistic accounts of Brown's three trials, which ended in his acquittal. Michael Berryhill presents Brown's story in his own words, set against the backdrop of the chilling plantation mentality of Texas prisons. Brown's attorneys—Craig Washington, Bill Habern, and Tim Sloan—undertook heroic strategies to defend him, even when the state refused to pay their fees. The Trials of Eroy Brown tells a landmark story of prison civil rights and the collapse of Jim Crow justice in Texas.

A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America

A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America PDF Author: Evan J. Mandery
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393239586
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice Drawing on never-before-published original source detail, the epic story of two of the most consequential, and largely forgotten, moments in Supreme Court history. For two hundred years, the constitutionality of capital punishment had been axiomatic. But in 1962, Justice Arthur Goldberg and his clerk Alan Dershowitz dared to suggest otherwise, launching an underfunded band of civil rights attorneys on a quixotic crusade. In 1972, in a most unlikely victory, the Supreme Court struck down Georgia’s death penalty law in Furman v. Georgia. Though the decision had sharply divided the justices, nearly everyone, including the justices themselves, believed Furman would mean the end of executions in America. Instead, states responded with a swift and decisive showing of support for capital punishment. As anxiety about crime rose and public approval of the Supreme Court declined, the stage was set in 1976 for Gregg v. Georgia, in which the Court dramatically reversed direction. A Wild Justice is an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at the Court, the justices, and the political complexities of one of the most racially charged and morally vexing issues of our time.

Grace and Justice on Death Row

Grace and Justice on Death Row PDF Author: Brian W. Stolarz
Publisher: Skyhorse
ISBN: 1510715126
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
A Washington Post bestseller! A chilling and compassionate look at how close an innocent man was to being put death with a foreword by Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking. What is worse than having a client on Death Row in Texas? Having a client on Death Row in Texas who is innocent and not knowing if you will be able to stop his execution in time. Grace and Justice on Death Row: A Race Against Time to Free an Innocent Man tells the story of Alfred Dewayne Brown, a man who spent over twelve years in prison (ten of them on Texas’ infamous Death Row) for a high-profile crime he did not commit, and his lawyer, Brian Stolarz, who dedicated his career and life to secure his freedom. The book chronicles Brown’s extraordinary journey to freedom against very long odds, overcoming unscrupulous prosecutors, corrupt police, inadequate defense counsel, and a broken criminal justice system. The book examines how a lawyer-client relationship turned into one of brotherhood. Grace And Justice On Death Row also addresses many issues facing the criminal justice system and the death penalty – race, class, adequate defense counsel, and intellectual disability, and proposes reforms. Told from Stolarz’s perspective, this raw, fast-paced look into what it took to save one man’s life will leave you questioning the criminal justice system in this country. It is a story of injustice and redemption that must be told.

Deadly Justice

Deadly Justice PDF Author: Frank Baumgartner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190841567
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In 1976, the US Supreme Court ruled in Gregg v. Georgia that the death penalty was constitutional if it complied with certain specific provisions designed to ensure that it was reserved for the 'worst of the worst.' The same court had rejected the death penalty just four years before in the Furman decision because it found that the penalty had been applied in a capricious and arbitrary manner. The 1976 decision ushered in the 'modern' period of the US death penalty, setting the country on a course to execute over 1,400 inmates in the ensuing years, with over 8,000 individuals currently sentenced to die. Now, forty years after the decision, the eminent political scientist Frank Baumgartner along with a team of younger scholars (Marty Davidson, Kaneesha Johnson, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Colin Wilson) have collaborated to assess the empirical record and provide a definitive account of how the death penalty has been implemented. Each chapter addresses a precise empirical question and provides evidence, not opinion, about whether how the modern death penalty has functioned. They decided to write the book after Justice Breyer issued a dissent in a 2015 death penalty case in which he asked for a full briefing on the constitutionality of the death penalty. In particular, they assess the extent to which the modern death penalty has met the aspirations of Gregg or continues to suffer from the flaws that caused its rejection in Furman. To answer this question, they provide the most comprehensive statistical account yet of the workings of the capital punishment system. Authoritative and pithy, the book is intended for both students in a wide variety of fields, researchers studying the topic, and--not least--the Supreme Court itself.

Deadly Justice

Deadly Justice PDF Author: Frank R. Baumgartner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190841540
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
In 1976, the US Supreme Court ruled in Gregg v. Georgia that the death penalty was constitutional if it complied with certain specific provisions designed to ensure that it was reserved for the 'worst of the worst.' The same court had rejected the death penalty just four years before in the Furman decision because it found that the penalty had been applied in a capricious and arbitrary manner. The 1976 decision ushered in the 'modern' period of the US death penalty, setting the country on a course to execute over 1,400 inmates in the ensuing years, with over 8,000 individuals currently sentenced to die. Now, forty years after the decision, the eminent political scientist Frank Baumgartner along with a team of younger scholars (Marty Davidson, Kaneesha Johnson, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Colin Wilson) have collaborated to assess the empirical record and provide a definitive account of how the death penalty has been implemented. Each chapter addresses a precise empirical question and provides evidence, not opinion, about whether how the modern death penalty has functioned. They decided to write the book after Justice Breyer issued a dissent in a 2015 death penalty case in which he asked for a full briefing on the constitutionality of the death penalty. In particular, they assess the extent to which the modern death penalty has met the aspirations of Gregg or continues to suffer from the flaws that caused its rejection in Furman. To answer this question, they provide the most comprehensive statistical account yet of the workings of the capital punishment system. Authoritative and pithy, the book is intended for both students in a wide variety of fields, researchers studying the topic, and--not least--the Supreme Court itself.

Texas Confidential

Texas Confidential PDF Author: Michael Varhola
Publisher: Clerisy Press
ISBN: 1578604583
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
“Everything is bigger in Texas,” as the saying goes, and this certainly applies to the history of sleaze, iniquity, and violence associated with the Lone Star State. Texas Confidential: Sex, Scandal, Murder, and Mayhem provides a glimpse at the state’s seamy underbelly and delves into some of the most striking episodes of lust, corruption, slaughter, and chaos in Texas and the people who have perpetrated them. To a colorful rogues’ gallery of lunatics, corrupt politicians, prostitutes, murderers, and every other sort of scoundrel that appears in the book, author Michael O. Varhola has added a smattering of UFOs, mythological beasts, and other paranormal oddities. Specific chapters among the 54 that appear in Texas Confidential include “Rogues of the Alamo,” a look at the things that just about everyone connected with the famous battle had to hide; “The Ivory Tower of Death,” on the bloody 1966 University of Texas rampage that left 18 people dead and 42 wounded; “Porno, Texas Style,” which includes a list of adult actors from the state; and “The Aurora UFO Incident,” about the state’s oldest documented UFO incident, which occurred in 1897.

DeathQuest

DeathQuest PDF Author: Robert M. Bohm
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317522907
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
This fourth edition of the first true textbook on the death penalty engages the reader with a full account of the arguments and issues surrounding capital punishment. The book begins with the history of the death penalty from colonial to modern times, and then examines the moral and legal arguments for and against capital punishment. It also provides an overview of major Supreme Court decisions and describes the legal process behind the death penalty. In addressing these issues, the author reviews recent developments in death penalty law and procedure, including ramifications of newer case law, such as that regarding using lethal injection as a method of execution. The author’s motivation has been to understand what motivates the "deathquest" of the American people, leading a large percentage of the public to support the death penalty. The book will educate readers so that whatever their death penalty opinions are, they are informed ones.