Author: Maurice Chammah
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 1524760277
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A deeply reported, searingly honest portrait of the death penalty in Texas—and what it tells us about crime and punishment in America “If you’re one of those people who despair that nothing changes, and dream that something can, this is a story of how it does.”—Anand Giridharadas, The New York Times Book Review WINNER OF THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS AWARD In 1972, the United States Supreme Court made a surprising ruling: the country’s death penalty system violated the Constitution. The backlash was swift, especially in Texas, where executions were considered part of the cultural fabric, and a dark history of lynching was masked by gauzy visions of a tough-on-crime frontier. When executions resumed, Texas quickly became the nationwide leader in carrying out the punishment. Then, amid a larger wave of criminal justice reform, came the death penalty’s decline, a trend so durable that even in Texas the punishment appears again close to extinction. In Let the Lord Sort Them, Maurice Chammah charts the rise and fall of capital punishment through the eyes of those it touched. We meet Elsa Alcala, the orphaned daughter of a Mexican American family who found her calling as a prosecutor in the nation’s death penalty capital, before becoming a judge on the state’s highest court. We meet Danalynn Recer, a lawyer who became obsessively devoted to unearthing the life stories of men who committed terrible crimes, and fought for mercy in courtrooms across the state. We meet death row prisoners—many of them once-famous figures like Henry Lee Lucas, Gary Graham, and Karla Faye Tucker—along with their families and the families of their victims. And we meet the executioners, who struggle openly with what society has asked them to do. In tracing these interconnected lives against the rise of mass incarceration in Texas and the country as a whole, Chammah explores what the persistence of the death penalty tells us about forgiveness and retribution, fairness and justice, history and myth. Written with intimacy and grace, Let the Lord Sort Them is the definitive portrait of a particularly American institution.
Author: Maurice Chammah
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
ISBN: 1524760269
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
In 1972 the United States Supreme Court made a surprising ruling: the country's death penalty system violated the Constitution. The backlash was swift, especially in Texas, where executions were considered part of the cultural fabric, and a dark history of lynching was masked by gauzy visions of a tough-on-crime frontier. When executions resumed, Texas quickly became the nationwide leader in carrying out the punishment. Amid a larger wave of criminal justice reform came the death penalty's decline, a trend so durable that even in Texas the punishment appears again close to extinction. Chammah charts the rise and fall of capital punishment through the eyes of those it touched. -- adapted from publisher info
Author: Daniel S. Medwed
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541675908
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
A groundbreaking exposé of how our legal system makes it nearly impossible to overturn wrongful convictions Thousands of innocent people are behind bars in the United States. But proving their innocence and winning their release is nearly impossible. In Barred, legal scholar Daniel S. Medwed argues that our justice system’s stringent procedural rules are largely to blame for the ongoing punishment of the innocent. Those rules guarantee criminal defendants just one opportunity to appeal their convictions directly to a higher court. Afterward, the wrongfully convicted can pursue only a few narrow remedies. Even when there is strong evidence of a miscarriage of justice, rigid guidelines, bias, and deference toward lower courts all too often prevent exoneration. Offering clear explanations of legal procedures alongside heart-wrenching stories of their devastating impact, Barred exposes how the system is stacked against the innocent and makes a powerful call for change.
Author: Steven Hale
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612199232
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
In the vein of Waiting for an Echo and Dead Man Walking, a deeply immersive look at justice in America, told through the interwoven lives of condemned prisoners and the men and women who come to visit them . . . In 2018, after nearly a decade’s hiatus, the state of Tennessee began executing death row inmates, bucking national trends that showed the death penalty in decline. In less than two years, the state put seven men to death, more than any other state but Texas in that time period. It was an execution spree unlike any seen in Tennessee since the 1940s, one only brought to a halt by a global pandemic. Award-winning journalist Steven Hale was the leading reporter on these executions, covering them both locally for the Nashville Scene alt-weekly and nationally for The Appeal. In Death Row Welcomes You, Hale traces the lives of condemned prisoners at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution—and the people who come to visit them. What brought them—the visitors and convicted murderers alike—to death row? The visitors are, for the most part, not activists—or at least they did not start out that way. Nor are they the sort of killer-obsessed death row groupies such settings sometimes attract. In fact, in most cases they are average people whose lives, not to mention their views on the death penalty, were turned upside down by a face-to-face meeting with a death row prisoner. Hale’s access to the people that make up that community afforded him a perspective that no other journalist has been granted, largely because Tennessee’s Department of Correction has all but shut off official media access. Combining topics that have long fascinated readers—crime, death, and life inside prison—Hale writes with humanity, empathy, and insight earned by befriending death row prisoners . . . and standing witness to their final moments.
Author: Frank R. Baumgartner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190841540
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 417
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Book Description
Forty years and 1,400 executions after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the death penalty constitutional, eminent political scientist Frank Baumgartner and a team of younger scholars have collaborated to assess the empirical record and provide a definitive account of how the death penalty has been implemented. A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty shows that all the flaws that caused the Supreme Court to invalidate the death penalty in 1972 remain and indeed that new problems have arisen. Far from "perfecting the mechanism" of death, the modern system has failed.
Author: Marc Hartzman
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
ISBN: 140223614X
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
Does God, in His infinite wisdom, convince people to get rid of their car insurance? Does He encourage cannibalism? Does the God of more than six billion people actually have time to root for the Minnesota Vikings? According to some, yes. How do they know? God told them. Luckily, God also told Marc Hartzman to write this book, a collection of the most shocking, absurd, and hilarious things people have ever claimed God asked them to do, and to present them for your pure reading enjoyment. Including: The man that God told to perform surgery on himself God's generous offer to miraculously fill his believer's gas tank The fateful day God (assumedly feeling nostalgic for his teen years) asked a man to TP a police station The woman God instructed to direct traffic—topless And, sadly, many more
Author: Carol S. Steiker
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674737423
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
Before constitutional regulation -- The Supreme Court steps in -- The invisibility of race in the constitutional revolution -- Between the Supreme Court and the states -- The failures of regulation -- An unsustainable system? -- Recurring patterns in constitutional regulation -- The future of the American death penalty -- Life after death
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.
Author: Robert Henderson
Publisher: Destiny Image Publishers
ISBN: 0768413834
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
Why do some people pray in agreement with Gods will, heart and timing, yet the desired answers do not come? Why would God not respond when we pray from the earnestness of our hearts? What is the problem, or better yet, what is the solution? Robert Henderson believes the answer is found in where your prayer actually takes place. We must direct our prayer towards the Courts of Heaven and not only the battlefield. Robert shows that it is in the courtrooms of Heaven where our breakthroughs can be found. When you learn to operate there you will see your answers unlocked and released. This book will teach you the legal processes of Heaven and how to operate in its courts. When you get off the battlefield and into the courtroom you can grant God the legal clearance to fulfill His passion and answer your prayers.
Author: Andrew Wommack
Publisher: Destiny Image Publishers
ISBN: 1680313444
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 109
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Book Description
God has more for us than what we are experiencing. We have all limited God in our lives at some point in one way or another. Fear of success, fear of persecution and imaginations are all ways that we limit God. We often see ourselves in a certain way but we have to change that image if we want to experience the abundant life that God has for...
