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Author: Brandon Garrett
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2017-09-25
Total Pages: 343
ISBN-13: 0674970993
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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: A. Hammel
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2010-06-16
Total Pages: 260
ISBN-13: 0230277365
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Examining the successful movements to abolish capital punishment in the UK, France, and Germany, this book examines the similarities in the social structure and political strategies of abolition movements in all three countries. An in-depth comparative analysis with other countries assesses chances of success of abolition elsewhere.
Author: Maurice Chammah
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2022-01-18
Total Pages: 369
ISBN-13: 1524760285
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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: Marc Bookman
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2021-06-15
Total Pages: 237
ISBN-13: 1620976595
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Powerful, wry essays offering modern takes on a primitive practice, from one of our most widely read death penalty abolitionists As Ruth Bader Ginsburg has noted, people who are well represented at trial rarely get the death penalty. But as Marc Bookman shows in a dozen brilliant essays, the problems with capital punishment run far deeper than just bad representation. Exploring prosecutorial misconduct, racist judges and jurors, drunken lawyering, and executing the innocent and the mentally ill, these essays demonstrate that precious few people on trial for their lives get the fair trial the Constitution demands. Today, death penalty cases continue to capture the hearts, minds, and eblasts of progressives of all stripes—including the rich and famous (see Kim Kardashian’s advocacy)—but few people with firsthand knowledge of America’s “injustice system” have the literary chops to bring death penalty stories to life. Enter Marc Bookman. With a voice that is both literary and journalistic, the veteran capital defense lawyer and seven-time Best American Essays “notable” author exposes the dark absurdities and fatal inanities that undermine the logic of the death penalty wherever it still exists. In essays that cover seemingly “ordinary” capital cases over the last thirty years, Bookman shows how violent crime brings out our worst human instincts—revenge, fear, retribution, and prejudice. Combining these emotions with the criminal legal system’s weaknesses—purposely ineffective, arbitrary, or widely infected with racism and misogyny—is a recipe for injustice. Bookman has been charming and educating readers in the pages of The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and Slate for years. His wit and wisdom are now collected and preserved in A Descending Spiral.
Author: Frank R. Baumgartner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2008-01-07
Total Pages: 10
ISBN-13: 1139469207
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Since 1996, death sentences in America have declined by more than 60 percent, reversing a generation-long trend toward greater acceptance of capital punishment. In theory, most Americans continue to support the death penalty. But it is no longer seen as a theoretical matter. Prosecutors, judges, and juries across the country have moved in large numbers to give much greater credence to the possibility of mistakes - mistakes that in this arena are potentially fatal. The discovery of innocence, documented in this book through painstaking analyses of media coverage and with newly developed methods, has led to historic shifts in public opinion and to a sharp decline in use of the death penalty by juries across the country. A social cascade, starting with legal clinics and innocence projects, has snowballed into a national phenomenon that may spell the end of the death penalty in America.
Author: Hans Göran Franck
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2021-09-13
Total Pages: 175
ISBN-13: 9004480277
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In this volume, Swedish human rights activist and political figure, Hans Göran Franck, examines the administration of the death penalty from a historical perspective. The author's opinions are based on his lifelong work and devotion to abolishing the 'barbaric punishment'. Building upon previously unpublished material and considerable detail drawn from Franck's personal experiences, it focuses on both the progressive developments within European countries and institutions over several decades, and the frustratingly retrograde situation that prevails in the United States. The author dedicated this book to those facing a sentence of death. During the course of his work, the author traveled to numerous countries and met many condemned men and women. Publication of this important volume, which comes a few years after Hans Göran Franck's untimely passing, coincides with a major development to which he contributed, the adoption of Protocol No. 13 to the European Convention on Human Rights, which abolishes capital punishment in both wartime and peacetime. William A. Schabas a law professor who specializes in the subject of capital punishment, has ensured that the manuscript is up to date, and contributed the introductory chapter.
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Published: 2012-05-26
Total Pages: 144
ISBN-13: 0309254167
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Many studies during the past few decades have sought to determine whether the death penalty has any deterrent effect on homicide rates. Researchers have reached widely varying, even contradictory, conclusions. Some studies have concluded that the threat of capital punishment deters murders, saving large numbers of lives; other studies have concluded that executions actually increase homicides; still others, that executions have no effect on murder rates. Commentary among researchers, advocates, and policymakers on the scientific validity of the findings has sometimes been acrimonious. Against this backdrop, the National Research Council report Deterrence and the Death Penalty assesses whether the available evidence provides a scientific basis for answering questions of if and how the death penalty affects homicide rates. This new report from the Committee on Law and Justice concludes that research to date on the effect of capital punishment on homicide rates is not useful in determining whether the death penalty increases, decreases, or has no effect on these rates. The key question is whether capital punishment is less or more effective as a deterrent than alternative punishments, such as a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Yet none of the research that has been done accounted for the possible effect of noncapital punishments on homicide rates. The report recommends new avenues of research that may provide broader insight into any deterrent effects from both capital and noncapital punishments.
Author: Hugo Adam Bedau
Publisher:
Published: 1984
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780914031017
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Bharat Malkani
Publisher:
Published: 2020-12-18
Total Pages: 232
ISBN-13: 9780367899035
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →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.
Author: Carol S. Steiker
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2016-11-07
Total Pages: 401
ISBN-13: 0674737423
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Refusing to eradicate the death penalty, the U.S. has attempted to reform and rationalize capital punishment through federal constitutional law. While execution chambers remain active in several states, Carol Steiker and Jordan Steiker argue that the fate of the American death penalty is likely to be sealed by this failed judicial experiment.
