Author: Maurice Chammah
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 1524760285
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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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: Seth Kotch
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469649888
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
For years, American states have tinkered with the machinery of death, seeking to align capital punishment with evolving social standards and public will. Against this backdrop, North Carolina had long stood out as a prolific executioner with harsh mandatory sentencing statutes. But as the state sought to remake its image as modern and business-progressive in the early twentieth century, the question of execution preoccupied lawmakers, reformers, and state boosters alike. In this book, Seth Kotch recounts the history of the death penalty in North Carolina from its colonial origins to the present. He tracks the attempts to reform and sanitize the administration of death in a state as dedicated to its image as it was to rigid racial hierarchies. Through this lens, Lethal State helps explain not only Americans' deep and growing uncertainty about the death penalty but also their commitment to it. Kotch argues that Jim Crow justice continued to reign in the guise of a modernizing, orderly state and offers essential insight into the relationship between race, violence, and power in North Carolina. The history of capital punishment in North Carolina, as in other states wrestling with similar issues, emerges as one of state-building through lethal punishment.
Author: M. Watt Espy
Publisher: Inter-University Consortium for Political & Social Research
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 124
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Book Description
This study furnishes data on executions performed in the United States under civil authority. It includes a description of each individual executed and the circumstances surrounding the crime for which the person was convicted. Variables include age, race, name, sex, and occupation of the offender, place, jurisdiction, date and method of execution and the crime for which the offender was executed.
Author: Stuart BANNER
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674020510
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398
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Book Description
The death penalty arouses our passions as does few other issues. Some view taking another person's life as just and reasonable punishment while others see it as an inhumane and barbaric act. But the intensity of feeling that capital punishment provokes often obscures its long and varied history in this country. Now, for the first time, we have a comprehensive history of the death penalty in the United States. Law professor Stuart Banner tells the story of how, over four centuries, dramatic changes have taken place in the ways capital punishment has been administered and experienced. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the penalty was standard for a laundry list of crimes--from adultery to murder, from arson to stealing horses. Hangings were public events, staged before audiences numbering in the thousands, attended by women and men, young and old, black and white alike. Early on, the gruesome spectacle had explicitly religious purposes--an event replete with sermons, confessions, and last minute penitence--to promote the salvation of both the condemned and the crowd. Through the nineteenth century, the execution became desacralized, increasingly secular and private, in response to changing mores. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, ironically, as it has become a quiet, sanitary, technological procedure, the death penalty is as divisive as ever. By recreating what it was like to be the condemned, the executioner, and the spectator, Banner moves beyond the debates, to give us an unprecedented understanding of capital punishment's many meanings. As nearly four thousand inmates are now on death row, and almost one hundred are currently being executed each year, the furious debate is unlikely to diminish. The Death Penalty is invaluable in understanding the American way of the ultimate punishment. Table of Contents: Abbreviations Introduction 1. Terror, Blood, and Repentance 2. Hanging Day 3. Degrees of Death 4. The Origins of Opposition 5. Northern Reform, Southern Retention 6. Into the Jail Yard 7. Technological Cures 8. Decline 9. To the Supreme Court 10. Resurrection Epilogue Appendix: Counting Executions Notes Acknowledgments Index Reviews of this book: [Banner] deftly balances history and politics, crafting a book that will be valuable to anyone interested in knowing more about capital punishment, no matter what his or her views are on the ethical issues surrounding the topic. --David Pitt, Booklist Reviews of this book: In this well-researched and clear account...Banner charts how and why this country went from having one of the world's mildest punitive systems to one of its harshest. --Publishers Weekly Reviews of this book: Stuart Banner's book is fine and balanced and important. His lucid history of this grim subject is scrupulously accurate...It is refreshingly free of the tendentiousness and the sensationalism that this subject invites. --Richard A. Posner, New Republic Reviews of this book: [The] contrast between the past and the present can now be seen with great clarity thanks to...Stuart Banner and his comprehensive book, The Death Penalty...American historians have been slow to undertake anything like a full-scale study of the subject...Banner's book does much to fill [the gaps]. His book is an important and comprehensive...treatment of the topic. --Hugo Adam Bedau, Boston Review Reviews of this book: Despite the gruesome nature of the book's topic, it is difficult to stop reading. Banner's research is fascinating, his writing style compelling. Given the emotional nature of the subject (few people known to me are wishy-washy about whether the death penalty is moral or immoral), Banner walks the line of neutrality skillfully, without seeming evasive. --Steve Weinberg, Legal Times Reviews of this book: Stuart Banner's The Death Penalty is a tour de force, remarkable for its neutrality as it traces the ways in which the death penalty has been applied, and for what kinds of crimes, from the Colonial era to the present. Banner...writes like a historian who believes perspective is best gained by dispassionately setting out what happened and letting everyone come to his or her own conclusions. I think, in this book, that works wonderfully. On a subject in which emotions run so high, it seems awfully useful to have a dispassionate voice. After all, if Banner allowed his own feelings on the death penalty--pro, con or somewhere in the middle--to be known, the book easily could be dismissed as a diatribe. He doesn't, and it can't. --Judith Neuman Beck, San Jose Mercury News Reviews of this book: Law professor Banner...offers a persuasive examination of the evolution of capital punishment from Colonial times onward. He makes clear that the death penalty has possessed generally consistent support from the US populace, although changes in the sensibilities of juries, executioners, legal theoreticians, and judges have occurred...Highly recommended. --R. C. Cottrell, Choice Reviews of this book: Stuart Banner aptly illustrates in The Death Penalty, like the nation, the death penalty has changed with the times...Banner's account spotlights a number of interesting trends in American history...Mostly evenhanded in the tour he provides through the history of the death penalty and its role in and reflection of American society, he has managed to provide an accessible look at what is a profoundly controversial and complicated subject. --Steven Martinovich, Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel Reviews of this book: "For centuries," Stuart Banner tells us, "Americans had been proud to possess a criminal-justice system that made less use of the death penalty than just about any other place on the globe, including the countries of western Europe." But no longer. Now we possess "one of the harshest criminal codes in the world." The Death Penalty helps explain that turnaround, but only in the course of a complicated story in which different factors emerge at different times to play often unforeseeable roles...[This is a] superbly told history. --Paul Rosenberg, Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News Reviews of this book: Stuart Banner's lucid, richly researched book brings us, for the first time, a comprehensive history of American capital punishment from colonial times to the present. He describes the practices that characterized the institution at different periods, elucidates their ritual purposes and social meanings, and identifies the forces that led to their transformation. The book's well-ordered narrative is interspersed with individual case histories, that give flesh and blood to the account. --David Garland, Times Literary Supplement Reviews of this book: [An] informative, even-handed, chillingly fascinating account of why and how the U.S. government and many state governments decided to sponsor executions of criminals--even though innocent defendants might die, too. --Jane Henderson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Reviews of this book: Stuart Banner's The Death Penalty is a splendidly objective achievement. Delightfully written, free of academic pretense, liberally sprinkled with apt references from contemporary sources, the book exhaustively explores the multifaceted evolution of America's penal practices. --Elsbeth Bothe, Baltimore Sun The Death Penalty is certain to be the definitive account of the American experience with capital punishment, from its beginnings in the seventeenth century, to the execution of Timothy McVeigh in 2001. This is a first rate piece of scholarship: well written, deeply researched, fascinating to read, and full of insights and good common sense. It is, in my view, one of the finest books to deal with this troubled and troubling subject. Historical and legal scholarship owe a debt of gratitude to Stuart Banner. --Lawrence Friedman, Stanford Law School A masterful book. This is a long overdue account which fills a huge gap in our understanding of America's long and complex relationship to state killing. With meticulous scholarship and lucid prose, Banner has written a compelling account of the place of capital punishment in our society. It sets the standard for all future scholarship on the history of the death penalty in America. --Austin Sarat, author of When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition The Death Penalty, a study we have badly needed, is the first history of the nation's engagement--as well as its disengagement--with capital punishment from the country's earliest days to the present. With a sure grasp of the constitutional issues, Stuart Banner greatly advances a conversation at last underway about the rightness of putting people to death for having inflicted a death. Banner's greatest and most useful feat is remaining dispassionate on a subject that he cares deeply about--as do a growing number of his fellow Americans. --William S. McFeely, author of Proximity to Death The Death Penalty beautifully explains the changing paths traveled by supporters and opponents of capital punishment over the years. It explores a subject of enormous symbolic importance to Americans today, linking our views about the death penalty to our larger concerns about crime. --David Oshinsky, author of "Worse Than Slavery": Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice Banner's book is a superbly detailed and textured social history of a subject too often treated in legal abstractions. It demonstrates how capital punishment has gnawed at the conscience and imagination of Americans, and how it has challenged their efforts to define themselves culturally, politically, and racially. --Robert Weisberg, Stanford Law School
Author: Jacqueline Herrmann
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638920380
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 57
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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1-, University of Frankfurt (Main) (Institut für England- und Amerikastudien), course: Social Issues in U.S. Supreme Court History, language: English, abstract: Die Arbeit verschafft einen Überblick über die Todesstrafe in der USA. Dabei wird versucht die gesamte Geschichte der Todesstrafe von der Kolonialzeit bis heute zu skizzieren. Anhand ausgewählter Fälle des Obersten Gerichtshofes (vor allem aus den 1960er Jahren) werden Verfassungsmässigkeit etc. bestimmter Fälle diskutiert. Insgesamt verschafft die Arbeit einen guten Überblick über das gesamte Todesstrafensystem der USA (nur auf jurisitischer, nicht politischer oder moralischer Ebene) Electrocution, lethal injection, gas chamber, hanging, shooting, beheading or stoning are different ways or instruments to execute a person who is sentenced to death. Death penalty or capital punishment means the intentional killing of a person who is guilty to have committed a certain crime. After a legal trial, the person is sentenced to death. The way by which the death is put into effect depends on the country and its laws. Death penalty or capital punishment is a very controversial topic concerning political, judicial and moral issues. This paper will be about the death penalty prior in the United States of America. In part I, I will present some facts and figures as well as give a short introduction to death penalty in general. I think it will be also necessary to outline the history of the death penalty in the United States. I will give a short overview of the most important developments from colonial times until the 1950s. The 1960s constituted a big challenge for the legality and constitutionality of the death penalty. That is why I will analyze this period in particular in Part II of this work. I will present selected Supreme Court Cases and their decisions. Thus, I will try to elaborate the judicial developme
Author: John D. Bessler
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 1555537170
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 474
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Book Description
This indispensable history of the Eighth Amendment and the founders' views of capital punishment is also a passionate call for the abolition of the death penalty based on the notion of cruel and unusual punishment
Author: Gordon Morris Bakken
Publisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 0826348580
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 694
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Book Description
Until the early twentieth century, printed invitations to executions issued by lawmen were a vital part of the ritual of death concluding a criminal proceeding in the United States. In this study, Gordon Morris Bakken invites readers to an understanding of the death penalty in America with a collection of essays that trace the history and politics of this highly charged moral, legal, and cultural issue. Bakken has solicited essays from historians, political scientists, and lawyers to ensure a broad treatment of the evolution of American cultural attitudes about crime and capital punishment. Part one of this extensive analysis focuses on politics, legal history, multicultural issues, and the international aspects of the death penalty. Part two offers a regional analysis with essays that put death penalty issues into a geographic and cultural context. Part three focuses on specific states with emphasis on the need to understand capital punishment in terms of state law development, particularly because states determine on whom the death penalty will be imposed. Part four examines the various means of death, from hanging to lethal injection, in state law case studies. And finally, part five focuses on the portrayal of capital punishment in popular culture.
Author: Jacqueline Herrmann
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638019551
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 27
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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1-, University of Frankfurt (Main) (Institut für England- und Amerikastudien), course: Social Issues in U.S. Supreme Court History, language: English, abstract: Die Arbeit verschafft einen Überblick über die Todesstrafe in der USA. Dabei wird versucht die gesamte Geschichte der Todesstrafe von der Kolonialzeit bis heute zu skizzieren. Anhand ausgewählter Fälle des Obersten Gerichtshofes (vor allem aus den 1960er Jahren) werden Verfassungsmässigkeit etc. bestimmter Fälle diskutiert. Insgesamt verschafft die Arbeit einen guten Überblick über das gesamte Todesstrafensystem der USA (nur auf jurisitischer, nicht politischer oder moralischer Ebene) Electrocution, lethal injection, gas chamber, hanging, shooting, beheading or stoning are different ways or instruments to execute a person who is sentenced to death. Death penalty or capital punishment means the intentional killing of a person who is guilty to have committed a certain crime. After a legal trial, the person is sentenced to death. The way by which the death is put into effect depends on the country and its laws. Death penalty or capital punishment is a very controversial topic concerning political, judicial and moral issues. This paper will be about the death penalty prior in the United States of America. In part I, I will present some facts and figures as well as give a short introduction to death penalty in general. I think it will be also necessary to outline the history of the death penalty in the United States. I will give a short overview of the most important developments from colonial times until the 1950s. The 1960s constituted a big challenge for the legality and constitutionality of the death penalty. That is why I will analyze this period in particular in Part II of this work. I will present selected Supreme Court Cases and their decisions. Thus, I will try to elaborate the judicial developments of the death penalty in the United States. Therefore, I will deal with cases regarding the constitutionality of the death penalty; furthermore with cases on death penalty laws and limitations of the death penalty. I want to emphasize that I will concentrate primarily on the judicial aspects of this topic, I will not deal with moral or political issues, but they might be mentioned additionally. By this means, I would like to examine how the death penalty is anchored in U.S. law and to find out which cases played an important role and contributed to this development. In so doing, I will draft a picture of the death penalty system in the United States.
Author: Brandon Garrett
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674970993
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343
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Book Description
Today, death sentences in the U.S. are as rare as lightning strikes. Brandon Garrett shows us the reasons why, and explains what the failed death penalty experiment teaches about the effect of inept lawyering, overzealous prosecution, race discrimination, wrongful convictions, and excessive punishments throughout the criminal justice system.
Author: Bharat Malkani
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780367899035
Category : Antislavery movements
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
It has long been acknowledged that the death penalty in the United States of America has been shaped by the country's history of slavery and racial violence, but this book considers the lesser-explored relationship between the two practices' respective abolitionist movements. The book explains how the historical and conceptual links between slavery and capital punishment have both helped and hindered efforts to end capital punishment. The comparative study also sheds light on the nature of such efforts, and offers lessons for how death penalty abolitionism should proceed in future. Using the history of slavery and abolition, it is argued that anti-death penalty efforts should be premised on the ideologies of the radical slavery abolitionists.
