Author: Jon B. Gould
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479873756
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293
Get Book Here
Book Description
The unsung heroes who defend the accused from the ultimate punishment What motivates someone to make a career out of defending some of the worst suspected killers of our time? In Capital Defense, Jon B. Gould and Maya Pagni Barak give us a glimpse into the lives of lawyers who choose to work in the darkest corner of our criminal justice system: death penalty cases. Based on in-depth personal interviews with a cross-section of the nation’s top capital defense teams, the book explores the unusual few who voluntarily represent society’s “worst of the worst.” With a compassionate and careful eye, Gould and Barak chronicle the experiences of American lawyers, who—like soldiers or surgeons—operate under the highest of stakes, where verdicts have the power to either “take death off the table” or put clients on “the conveyor belt towards death.” These lawyers are a rare breed in a field that is otherwise seen as dirty work and in a system that is overburdened, under-resourced, and overshadowed by social, cultural, and political pressures. Examining the ugliest side of our criminal justice system, Capital Defense offers an up-close perspective on the capital litigation process and its impact on the people who participate in it.
Author: Susannah Sheffer
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 0826519105
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226
Get Book Here
Book Description
Intimate conversations with the dedicated lawyers who try, but too often fail, to prevent executions
Author: Edward Feser
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1681497689
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 426
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Catholic Church has in recent decades been associated with political efforts to eliminate the death penalty. It was not always so. This timely work reviews and explains the Catholic Tradition regarding the death penalty, demonstrating that it is not inherently evil and that it can be reserved as a just form of punishment in certain cases. Drawing upon a wealth of philosophical, scriptural, theological, and social scientific arguments, the authors explain the perennial teaching of the Church that capital punishment can in principle be legitimate—not only to protect society from immediate physical danger, but also to administer retributive justice and to deter capital crimes. The authors also show how some recent statements of Church leaders in opposition to the death penalty are prudential judgments rather than dogma. They reaffirm that Catholics may, in good conscience, disagree about the application of the death penalty. Some arguments against the death penalty falsely suggest that there has been a rupture in the Church's traditional teaching and thereby inadvertently cast doubt on the reliability of the Magisterium. Yet, as the authors demonstrate, the Church's traditional teaching is a safeguard to society, because the just use of the death penalty can be used to protect the lives of the innocent, inculcate a horror of murder, and affirm the dignity of human beings as free and rational creatures who must be held responsible for their actions. By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed challenges contemporary Catholics to engage with Scripture, Tradition, natural law, and the actual social scientific evidence in order to undertake a thoughtful analysis of the current debate about the death penalty.
Author: Welsh S. White
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472021591
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 230
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Anyone who cares about capital punishment should read this compelling, lucid account of the obstacles defense attorneys face and the strategies they adopt." --John Parry, University of Pittsburgh School of Law "With its compelling narratives of cases, strategies, and ethical dilemmas, Litigating in the Shadow of Death is difficult to put down. . . . This pathbreaking book encapsulates the experience of the most respected capital defenders in America and shows how they save even the worst of the worst from execution. It also shows how sleeping and otherwise incompetent lawyers bring death sentences to their clients. Litigating in the Shadow of Death explores the lawyers' tasks at every stage of the criminal process--investigation, client interviewing, conferring with victims' families, plea bargaining, trial, appeal, and post-conviction proceedings." --Albert W. Alschuler, Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Criminology, University of Chicago "A unique and profoundly important contribution to the literature on the death penalty. White allows the leading capital defense attorneys to speak in their own voices. His work reveals a new source of arbitrariness in the death system--whether the penalty is imposed turns more on who is your lawyer than on how evil was your deed or your character. Litigating in the Shadow of Death offers concrete guidelines for better lawyering, protection of the innocent, and understanding the artistry of the best capital attorneys. This is vivid, gripping stuff." --Andrew Taslitz, Professor of Law, Howard University "A most illuminating book by a splendid writer and an eminent critic of the capital punishment system." --Yale Kamisar, Professor of Law, University of San Diego "Welsh White has written another excellent book on the death penalty--this one on how defense attorneys in capital cases successfully prevent the state from executing their clients. Based on original research, Litigating in the Shadow of Death is informative and insightful. This is a book that all serious students of American capital punishment must read." --Richard Leo, University of California, Irvine Welsh S. White was Bessie McKee Walthour Endowed Chair and Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh.
Author: David F. DeRosa
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 268
Get Book Here
Book Description
The future economic well-being of both developed and developing nations depends upon an honest look at the irrefutable lessons of these recent financial disasters - before they are repeated."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Robert M. Bohm
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317229835
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 896
Get Book Here
Book Description
Capital punishment is one of the more controversial subjects in the social sciences, especially in criminal justice and criminology. Over the last decade or so, the United States has experienced a significant decline in the number of death sentences and executions. Since 2007, eight states have abolished capital punishment, bringing the total number of states without the death penalty to 19, plus the District of Columbia, and more are likely to follow suit in the near future (Nebraska reinstated its death penalty in 2016). Worldwide, 70 percent of countries have abolished capital punishment in law or in practice. The current trend suggests the eventual demise of capital punishment in all but a few recalcitrant states and countries. Within this context, a fresh look at capital punishment in the United States and worldwide is warranted. The Routledge Handbook on Capital Punishment comprehensively examines the topic of capital punishment from a wide variety of perspectives. A thoughtful introductory chapter from experts Bohm and Lee presents a contextual framework for the subject matter, and chapters present state-of-the-art analyses of a range of aspects of capital punishment, grouped into five sections: (1) Capital Punishment: History, Opinion, and Culture; (2) Capital Punishment: Rationales and Religious Views; (3) Capital Punishment and Constitutional Issues; (4) The Death Penalty’s Administration; and (5) The Death Penalty’s Consequences. This is a key collection for students taking courses in prisons, penology, criminal justice, criminology, and related subjects, and is also an essential reference for academics and practitioners working in prison service or in related agencies.
Author: James R. Acker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317689313
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 375
Get Book Here
Book Description
The death penalty has inspired controversy for centuries. Raising questions regarding capital punishment rather than answering them, Questioning Capital Punishment offers the footing needed to allow for more informed consideration and analysis of these controversies. Acker edits judicial decisions that have addressed constitutional challenges to capital punishment and its administration in the United States and uses complementary materials to offer historical, empirical, and normative perspectives about death penalty policies and practices. This book is ideal for upper-level undergraduate and graduate classes in criminal justice.
Author: Benjamin Fleury-Steiner
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1803929154
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 425
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Elgar Companion to Capital Punishment and Society presents a multidisciplinary overview of capital punishment’s influences, processes and outcomes across society. A global range of philosophers, social scientists, legal experts, political theorists and historians critically analyse the trajectory of the death penalty in both retentionist and abolitionist countries, underscoring how state killing remains a crucial issue worldwide.
Author: Ross Kleinstuber
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317122895
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 184
Get Book Here
Book Description
Capital punishment policies in the USA are almost always justified by an individualistic belief in either rational choice or dispositional attribution, which justifies the death penalty either as a deterrent, or for retributive or incapacitative purposes. This book takes an in-depth look at the mitigation process and the use of individualism in the capital sentencing process. The work examines the use of individualistic (hegemonic) and contextualizing (subversive) discourses in the mitigation cases presented by capital defense attorneys and experts from trials in Delaware, and how these discourses were understood, interpreted, and utilized by jurors who served on those trials and by the judges who imposed the final sentences. This in-depth sociological examination of the use of individualizing and contextualizing accounts throughout the entire mitigation process helps to illuminate the challenges involved in structuring a death penalty that is not arbitrary in a culture that is overwhelmed by individualizing discourses, and thus struggles to account for the entrenched racial and economic inequality that is so conducive to lethal violence. In conclusion, it questions the entire premise of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence of death, which rests on a belief that the discretion of decision makers can be 'guided' in a way that accounts for contextualizing evidence and will reduce the death penalty’s arbitrary and discriminatory application.
Author: Austin Sarat
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804752343
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364
Get Book Here
Book Description
How does the way we think and feel about the world around us affect the existence and administration of the death penalty? What role does capital punishment play in defining our political and cultural identity? In this volume the authors argue that in order to understand the death penalty we need to know more about the “cultural lives”—past and present—of the state’s ultimate sanction.
