Author: Lynden Harris
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 147802142X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246
Get Book
Book Description
Upon receiving his execution date, one of the thousands of men living on death row in the United States had an epiphany: “All there ever is, is this moment. You, me, all of us, right here, right now, this minute, that's love.” Right Here, Right Now collects the powerful, first-person stories of dozens of men on death rows across the country. From childhood experiences living with poverty, hunger, and violence to mental illness and police misconduct to coming to terms with their executions, these men outline their struggle to maintain their connection to society and sustain the humanity that incarceration and its daily insults attempt to extinguish. By offering their hopes, dreams, aspirations, fears, failures, and wounds, the men challenge us to reconsider whether our current justice system offers actual justice or simply perpetuates the social injustices that obscure our shared humanity.
Author: Michelle Lyons
Publisher: Bonnier Publishing Ltd.
ISBN: 1788700449
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Get Book
Book Description
IN 12 YEARS, MICHELLE LYONS WITNESSED NEARLY 300 EXECUTIONS. First as a reporter and then as a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Michelle was a frequent visitor to Huntsville's Walls Unit, where she recorded and relayed the final moments of death row inmates' lives before they were put to death by the state. Michelle was in the death chamber as some of the United States' most notorious criminals, including serial killers, child murderers and rapists, spoke their last words on earth, while a cocktail of lethal drugs surged through their veins. Michelle supported the death penalty, before misgivings began to set in as the executions mounted. During her time in the prison system, and together with her dear friend and colleague, Larry Fitzgerald, she came to know and like some of the condemned men and women she saw die. She began to query the arbitrary nature of the death penalty and ask the question: do executions make victims of all of us? An incredibly powerful and unique look at the complex story of capital punishment, as told by those whose lives have been shaped by it, Death Row: The Final Minutes is an important take on crime and punishment at a fascinating point in America's political history.
Author: Saundra D. Westervelt
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813553393
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301
Get Book
Book Description
Life after Death Row examines the post-incarceration struggles of individuals who have been wrongly convicted of capital crimes, sentenced to death, and subsequently exonerated. Saundra D. Westervelt and Kimberly J. Cook present eighteen exonerees’ stories, focusing on three central areas: the invisibility of the innocent after release, the complicity of the justice system in that invisibility, and personal trauma management. Contrary to popular belief, exonerees are not automatically compensated by the state or provided adequate assistance in the transition to post-prison life. With no time and little support, many struggle to find homes, financial security, and community. They have limited or obsolete employment skills and difficulty managing such daily tasks as grocery shopping or banking. They struggle to regain independence, self-sufficiency, and identity. Drawing upon research on trauma, recovery, coping, and stigma, the authors weave a nuanced fabric of grief, loss, resilience, hope, and meaning to provide the richest account to date of the struggles faced by people striving to reclaim their lives after years of wrongful incarceration.
Author: Hans Toch
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
ISBN: 9781433829000
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book
Book Description
PROSE Award Finalist for Psychology This book synthesizes scholarly reflections with personal accounts from prison administrators and inmates to show the harsh reality of life on death row.
Author: Anthony Graves
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807062529
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 218
Get Book
Book Description
Written by a wrongfully convicted man who spent 16 years in solitary confinement and 12 years on death row, a powerful memoir about fighting for—and winning—exoneration. In the summer of 1992, a grandmother, a teenage girl, and four children under the age of ten were beaten and stabbed to death in Somerville, Texas. The perpetrator set the house on fire to cover his tracks, deepening the heinousness of the crime and rocking the tiny community to its core. Authorities were eager to make an arrest. Five days later, Anthony Graves was in custody. Graves, then twenty-six years old and without an attorney, was certain that his innocence was obvious. He did not know the victims, he had no knowledge about the crime, and he had an airtight alibi with witnesses. There was also no physical evidence linking him to the scene. Yet Graves was indicted, convicted of capital murder, sentenced to death, and, over the course of twelve years on death row, given two execution dates. He was not freed for eighteen years, two months, four days. Through years of suffering the whims of rogue prosecutors, vote-hungry district attorneys, and Texas State Rangers who played by their own rules, Graves was frequently exposed to the dire realities of being poor and black in the criminal justice system. He witnessed fellow inmates who became his friends and confidants be taken away, one by one, to their deaths. And he missed out on seeing his three young sons mature into men. Graves’s only solace was his infinite hope that the state would not execute him for a crime he did not commit. To maintain his dignity and sanity, Graves made sure as many people as possible knew about his case. He wrote letters to whomever he thought would listen. Pen pals in countries all over the world became allies, and he attracted the attention of a savvy legal team that overcame setback after setback, chiseling away at the state’s faulty case against him. Everyone’s efforts eventually worked. After Graves’s exoneration, the original prosecutor on his case was disbarred. Graves is one of a growing number of innocent people exonerated from death row. The moving account of his saga—of his ultimate fight for freedom from inside a prison cell—is as haunting as it is poignant, and as shameful to the legal system as it is inspiring to those on the losing end of it.
Author: Anthony Ray Hinton
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250124719
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 270
Get Book
Book Description
"A powerful, revealing story of hope, love, justice, and the power of reading by a man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime he didn't commit"--
Author: Robert W Murray
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780984257904
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 330
Get Book
Book Description
Whatever your views on Capital Punishment, this revised, second edition of "Life on Death Row," by Robert W. Murray, will bring you face-to-face with the reality-the inside story-of the death penalty experience. It includes a new Appendix of photographs of the prison. This exposition from the heart of death row is a unique journey into the ultimate sanction of death by the state. Thought-provoking and insightful, the author gives an uncommon view into the life of a death row prisoner. You will observe the real operation and management of one of America's super-max prisons; share in the strange and frightening experience of being prematurely served with a death warrant, a notice of your imminent murder; explore the reality of socalled "humane" execution; and follow the rise and fall of the infamous "death row chain gang," as conceived by Arizona's former governor, who was then embroiled in a scandal which ultimately led to his conviction and removal from office. Learn the true facts of how the chain gang ended in a hail of bullets when two people were killed in a misbegotten escape attempt. Drawn from the personal experience of an internationally published writer/prisoner, this book is a complete in-depth examination of real life on death row, with rare photographs of scenes inside the supermax prison. It is loaded with insightful revelations, delivers an unvarnished perspective on the reality of Capital Punishment, and challenges the conventional wisdom of Arizona's legalized murder in a dramatic and unflinching style.
Author: Bruce Jackson
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 1469600153
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Get Book
Book Description
In this stark and powerful book, Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian explore life on Death Row in Texas and in other states, as well as the convoluted and arbitrary judicial processes that populate all Death Rows. They document the capriciousness of capital punishment and capture the day-to-day experiences of Death Row inmates in the official "nonperiod" between sentencing and execution. In the first section, "Pictures," ninety-two photographs taken during their fieldwork for the book and documentary film Death Row illustrate life on cell block J in Ellis Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections. The second section, "Words," further reveals the world of Death Row prisoners and offers an unflinching commentary on the judicial system and the fates of the men they met on the Row. The third section, "Working," addresses profound moral and ethical issues the authors have encountered throughout their careers documenting the Row. Included in this enhanced ebook edition is Jackson and Christian's 1979 documentary film, Death Row.
Author: Jerry Bledsoe
Publisher: Diversion Books
ISBN: 1626812888
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 546
Get Book
Book Description
In this “true story that reads like a novel,” the #1 New York Times–bestselling author reveals the facts behind a notorious Southern murder case (Library Journal). When North Carolina farmer Stuart Taylor died after a sudden illness, his forty-six-year-old fiancée, Velma Barfield, was overcome with grief. Taylor’s family grieved with her—until the autopsy revealed traces of arsenic poisoning. Turned over to the authorities by her own son, Velma stunned her family with more revelations. This wasn’t the first time she had committed cold-blooded murder, and she would eventually be tried by the “world’s deadliest prosecutor” and sentenced to death. This book probes Velma’s stark descent into madness, her prescription drug addiction, and her effort to turn her life around through Christianity. From her harrowing childhood to the crimes that incited a national debate over the death penalty, to the final moments of her execution, Velma Barfield’s life of crime and punishment, revenge and redemption, this is crime reporting at its most gripping and profound. “A painfully intimate, moving story about the life and death of the only woman executed in the U.S. between 1962–1998 . . . With graceful writing and thorough reporting, it makes the reader look hard at something dark and sad in the human soul . . . Breathes new life into the true crime genre.” —The News & Observer “Undertakes to answer the questions about the justice system and the motives that drive women to kill.” —The Washington Post Book World “An extraordinary piece of writing . . . The most chilling description of a legal execution that we are ever likely to get.” —Citizen-Times “Taut and engrossing on the nature of justice and the death penalty as well as on guilt and responsibility.” —Booklist
Author: Bruce Jackson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 080788264X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Get Book
Book Description
In this stark and powerful book, Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian explore life on Death Row in Texas and in other states, as well as the convoluted and arbitrary judicial processes that populate all Death Rows. They document the capriciousness of capital punishment and capture the day-to-day experiences of Death Row inmates in the official "nonperiod" between sentencing and execution. In the first section, "Pictures," ninety-two photographs taken during their fieldwork for the book and documentary film Death Row illustrate life on cell block J in Ellis Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections. The second section, "Words," further reveals the world of Death Row prisoners and offers an unflinching commentary on the judicial system and the fates of the men they met on the Row. The third section, "Working," addresses profound moral and ethical issues the authors have encountered throughout their careers documenting the Row. Included is a DVD of Jackson and Christian's 1979 documentary film, Death Row.
