CUADP Book List
RECOMMENDED READINGS:
CUADP is pleased to provide links so that you can review and purchase these
titles directly from Amazon.com or Powells.com, depending on your
preference or book availability. Please note that availability and price
may vary.
Please note also that if you purchase one of these books by following
either of the links below the title, CUADP will receive a small percentage
of the purchase price. That said, we also urge you to consider your local
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Click here to go to our alphabetical index of titles.
Click here to see our featured addition
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15,543 and Counting : D.L. Carcara
On September 2, 1983, Jimmy Lee Gray died smashing his head into a metal pole located behind his head as a result of being strapped to a
chair and forced to inhale a deadly mixture of sulfuric acid and hydrogen cyanide. On May 4, 1990,
Jesse Tafero, at the time living and breathing, died after being set on fire while completely incapacitated being bound to a chair.
These instances sound much like the works of a sadistic serial killer torturing his victims,
but they are in reality the works of State Departments of Corrections here in America.
These documented cases as well as many more wrongs involving the administration of capital punishment in the
United States are found in 15,543 and Counting. Each and every step, from the very beginning of the guilt trial to the very end of the
cooling of the corpse, is addressed and accounted for in 15,543 and Counting. Among the countless informative sources are testimonies of
corrections officers assigned to the care and custody of death row inmates, as well as actual quotes from death row inmates themselves.
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The Activist's Handbook: A Primer
: Randy Shaw (updated 2001)
 The Activist's Handbook is a hard-hitting guide to winning social change in the 1990s. Randy Shaw, attorney and longtime activist for urban issues, shows how positive change can still be accomplished despite an increasingly grim political order, if activists employ the strategies set forth in this desperately needed primer. Inspiring "fear and loathing" in politicians, building diverse coalitions, and harnessing the media, the courts, and the electoral process to one's cause are only some of the key tactics Shaw advocates and explains. Central to all social- change activism, Shaw shows, is being proactive: rather than simply reacting to right-wing proposals, activists must develop an agenda and focus their resources on achieving it. (Book Description)
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Actual Innocence : Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted: Jim Dwyer, Peter Neufeld, Barry Scheck
A report on the many ways justice can go astray and an innocent person be convicted. Perhaps one of the more shocking of their revelations is the unreliability of eyewitness testimony; they present a case in which three eyewitnesses separately identified the defendant as a rapist/robber. [The authors] offer a litany of such errors, along with detailed case histories. [They] offer concrete advice on how these dangers can minimized. This is an alarming wake-up call to those who administer our justice system that serious flaws must be addressed to protect the innocent (
Publishers Weekly)
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Adams V. Texas: Randall Dale Adams, et al
"Adams's story gained nationwide attention in Errol Morris's . . . film, The Thin Blue Line, which {argued that} . . . Adams had been convicted in Texas of a policeman's murder, largely due to evidence given by the person who probably was the real killer. The film's acclaim and the attention it
brought to the case eventually led to Adams's release from prison, where he had served 12 years." (Libr J) This is an account of Adams's experiences.
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Against Time: Darrell Grayson
A lot of people in prison turn to poetry. Any poet—and any convict—can easily understand why. How rare, though, to discover writing of this quality by a man with so few resources, no poetry mentors, no workshops, and a limited collection of poetry books. My colleague, poet Sandra Agricola, says of Darrell's poetry, "such freedom evoked by one so confined."
This is a book of poems. It does not speak directly of the death penalty and will not argue a case to the reader. However, after hearing this voice, a reader cannot help but be reminded that the State of Alabama has the power to still it. We take comfort in knowing that years from now, regardless of those years go for Darrell, he will have left behind something good, something beautiful. We all hope that is true of our lives.
Proceeds from the sales of Darrell’s book go to Project Hope. We hope you’ll order a copy. Please consider ordering an extra copy or two for your friends. Put a copy in the hands of an open-minded person who is pro-Death Penalty. Remind them of the humanity of those who face execution.
To order, please send $13.00 ($12.00 plus $1.00 shipping and handling) to:
Mercy Seat Press
2121 Vesthavia Drive
Birmingham, Alabama 35216
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Almost Home : My Life Story : Damien Echols
Almost Home is a message to you from a faraway place. It is a message from a 12-foot by 9-foot cell in a cinderblock building surrounded by coils of razor wire in the middle of a dirt field in Arkansas. It was written by a young man named Damien Echols and it chronicles his life and his experiences in a way that clearly illuminates him, not as a monster, but as a human being. For over 10 years Damien has been an inmate on death row for a crime he did not commit. He, along with Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley have become known as The West Memphis Three, and though the story of their arrest and conviction is widely known, most people don’t know the real people behind the sound bites and the TV news segment clips. Damien has spent much of his time behind bars diligently maintaining his integrity and his sanity by writing.
Almost Home is the product of that self-discipline, and in it you will meet someone who has survived an ordeal many of us would find impossible to live through. There are a few who still believe that Damien is a devil-worshipping child killer, but as time passes and more facts rise to the surface, it becomes even more clear that he is the victim of a peculiar species of hysteria. Read this book and know the truth about him. It is an urgent message from death row; the whole story of who Damien Echols really is.
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Almost Midnight: An American Story of Murder and Redemption: Michael W. Cuneo
Darrell Mease, the Ozarks-born convicted murderer who got a death row intervention from Pope John Paul II in 1998 (the execution was to take place on the day the Pope visited St. Louis), is at the center of this true crime saga. Cuneo (American Exorcism) follows Mease from his religious upbringing in the backwoods of Missouri, through his tour in Vietnam and baptism into the crystal methamphetamines trade to his love affair with Mary Epps and brutal murder of a drug kingpin, his wife and disabled grandson. Cuneo looks closely at Mease's time in prison, where he rediscovers religion and, while professing "God is my lawyer," is miraculously delivered from lethal injection just as he predicted he would be. Cuneo's detailed descriptions of the virtues (loyalty, self-reliance, faith, family) and negatives (violence, chemical dependency, lawlessness) of the Ozarks' culture not only fleshes out Mease's personality but also vividly portrays this overlooked area of Americana. Cuneo's skillful writing allows him to convey the romantic notions of Mease's outlaw ways and travels on America's back roads, while never romanticizing the violence or the hand-to-mouth living. The book could use a little more analysis, however, on the impact Vietnam and crystal meth had on Mease's psyche and behavior. When all is said and done, one cannot help but appreciate Cuneo's in-depth, interwoven stories of Mease and the Ozarks.
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America's Experiment with Capital Punishment: Reflections on the Past, Present, and Future of the Ultimate Penal Sanction: James R. Acker, Robert Bohm, and Charles S. Lanier (Eds.)
Comprises 21 essays which analyze changes in capital punishment and its administration over the last 25 years and explores issues relevant to the present and future of the death penalty in America. The essays address capital punishment public opinion, law and politics, the justice of the death penalty, the utility of the capital sanction, jury decision making,
defense counsel, race discrimination, mitigation theory, cost, habeas corpus, victims, the role of mental health professionals, and executive clemency. (Book News, Inc.)
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America Without the Death Penalty: States Leading the Way: John F. Galliher, Larry W. Koch, Teresa J. Guess, David Patrick Keys
Employing the case study method, the work focuses on the nine states-Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine, Minnesota, North Dakota, Hawaii, Alaska, Iowa, and West Virginia-that took legislative action. Three other states-Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont-that banned the death penalty through court decisions are discussed, as is the District of Columbia's courageous fight against Congressional efforts to reestablish the death penalty in the nation's capital. The inquiry delves into the local relationship between death penalty abolition and numerous empirical factors, including: economic conditions, public sentiment, the roles of the political, social, and economic elite, the mass media, population diversity, murder rates, and the regional history of executions.
With its solid research and methodology, this work provides invaluable historical and practical information to advocates striving to abolish capital punishment in other states.
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In America's Court: How a Civil Lawyer Who Likes to Settle Stumbled into a Criminal Trial: Thomas Geoghegan
A candid indictment of the American criminal justice system from the acclaimed author of Which Side Are You On? In previous books, including the widely praised labor history Which Side Are You On?, attorney Thomas Geoghegan has written with an insight and sensibility that enable him to use the smallest details of life as microcosms of larger truths. In In America's Court, Geoghegan's personal account of his experience with criminal law, he directs this sensibility toward a re-evaluation of his own career as a civil lawyer and a critique of the criminal justice system. When asked by a friend and public defender to assist with the defense in a criminal case, Geoghegan realizes that his twenty years as a prominent labor lawyer in civil court—where most arguments are made for quick settlement in the judge's quarters—have left him totally unprepared for the realities of criminal justice in the United States. Particularly when the case at hand is the defense of a twenty-two-year-old who, at the age of fifteen, was sentenced to forty years in prison for acting as the unarmed lookout in a botched burglary attempt. Suddenly Geoghegan must face the whims of jury selection, prosecutorial advantage, and the simple fact that the course of their client's life will be determined by the case. In America's Court is a candid indictment of a criminal justice system that, by routinely imprisoning minors, violates what the rest of the world considers to be all of our basic human rights. In addition, In America's Court is a call to lawyers to act with courage despite the frustrations of the profession. Geoghegan argues that there remain aspects of the law that are heroic and unbroken, and that, rather than civil or criminal law, the law of human rights should be supreme. Written in a uniquely ironic and personal style, In America's Court is a fascinating narrative of justice denied.
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Among the Lowest of the Dead: The Culture of Capital Punishment (Law, Meaning, and Violence) (2nd Edition, June 2006): David von Drehle
"A compelling argument against capital punishment. . . . Examining politicians, judges (including Supreme Court Justices), prosecutors, defense attorneys and the condemned themselves, the author makes an effective case that, despite new laws, execution is no less a lottery than it has always been."
--Publishers Weekly
"Among the Lowest of the Dead is a powerfully written and meticulously researched book that makes an invaluable contribution to the growing public dialogue about capital punishment in America. It's one of those rare books that bridges the gap between mass audiences and scholarly disciplines, the latter including sociology, political science, criminology and journalism. The book is required reading in my Investigative Journalism classes--and my students love it!"
--David Protess, Northwestern University
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Among the Lowest of the Dead: David von Drehle
Von Drehle's argument against capital punishment emphasizes the capriciousness with which death penalty laws are applied (Publisher's Weekly)
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Back From The Dead: Joan M. Cheever
What would happen if the United States abolished the death penalty and emptied its Death Rows? If killers were released from prison? What would they do with their second chance to live? Would they kill again?
Back From The Dead is the story of 589 former death row inmates who, through a lottery of fate, were given a second chance at life in 1972 when the death penalty was abolished; it returned to the United States four years later.
During the years she represented Walter Williams on Texas’ Death Row, Cheever always wondered what would happen if his death sentence was reversed and he was eventually released from prison. Would he have killed again? Two years after Williams’ execution, Cheever was determined to find the answer. Leaving her young family and comfortable life in suburbia, she traveled across the U.S. and into the lives and homes of former Death Row inmates, armed only with a tape recorder, notepad, a cell phone that didn’t always work, and a lot of faith. In Back from the Dead , Cheever describes her own journey and reveals these tales of second chances: of tragedy and failure, racism and injustice, and redemption and rehabilitation.
Joan M. Cheever is an award-winning legal affairs journalist and a former managing editor of The National Law Journal. Cheever received her Bachelor’s degree from Southern Methodist University; a Master’s in journalism from Columbia University and her law degree from St. Mary’s University. She is a member of the bar in the states of Texas, New York and Connecticut.
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The Biblical Truth about America's Death Penalty: Dale S. Recinella (fall 2004)
While secular support for capital punishment in America seems to be waning, religious conservatives, particularly in the "Bible belt," remain staunch advocates of the death penalty, citing biblical law and practice to defend government-sanctioned killing. In this close reading of Hebrew and Christian scriptures, Dale S. Recinella compares biblical teaching about the death penalty, including such passages as "eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life," with the nation's current system of capital punishment, and offers persuasive arguments for a faith-based moratorium—and eventual abolition—of executions.
Framing his careful and incisive analysis as a legal brief to those who believe the Bible mandates the ultimate punishment, the author addresses two critical areas of inquiry: what do the scriptures tell us about who is deserving of death and who has the authority to kill, and what do they tell us about the required standards for execution and the plight of victims' families. Recinella's examination of the Hebrew Torah, or Christian Pentateuch, and the Talmud reveals that the biblical death penalty was not a simple system of swift retribution, but a complex and practical set of laws that guided capital courts established under the Sanhedrin. His scrutiny of these texts, the Christian doctrine of atonement, and Romans 13 in the Pauline Epistles, draws parallels between the traditional biblical arguments used in favor of capital punishment and those used as the basis for pro-slavery positions in the nineteenth century. Demonstrating that both approaches are unsubstantiated in biblical terms, Recinella debunks the accepted religious reasoning for support of the death penalty and shows instead that the Bible's strict conditions for sanctioning execution are at odds with the arbitrary ways in which capital punishment is administered in the United States. He provides convincing evidence that a sentence of death in today's criminal justice system in fact fails to meet both the Bible's exacting procedural requirements and its strict limitations upon judicial authority.
By providing actual scriptural language and foundation to counter the position that biblical truth justifies a pro-death penalty stance, this thoughtful, solidly researched, and well-reasoned work will give pause to religious fundamentalists and challenge them to rethink their strongly held views on capital punishment.
Dale S. Recinella is an attorney who serves as a state-certified spiritual counselor and Catholic lay chaplain for Florida's prison system, ministering to death row inmates and prisoners in long-term solitary confinement. He is also a columnist, public speaker, and frequent panelist on worldwide Vatican Radio. He lives in Macclenny, Florida.
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Bloodsworth: The True Story of the First Death Row Inmate Exonerated by DNA: Tim Junkin
Scheduled to be published by Algonquin in September (a review will be forthcoming).
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The Book of Daniel: E. L. Doctorow
The central figure of this novel is a young man whose parents were executed for conspiring to steal atomic secrets for Russia.
His name is Daniel Isaacson, and as the story opens, his parents have been dead for many years. He has had a long time to adjust to their deaths. He has not adjusted.
It is a book rich in characters, from elderly grand- mothers of immigrant culture, to covert radicals of the McCarthy era, to hippie marchers on the Pen-tagon. It is a book that spans the quarter-century of American life since World War II.It is a book about the nature of Left politics in this country—its sacrificial rites, its peculiar cruelties, its humility, its bitterness. It is a book about some of the beautiful and terrible feelings of childhood. It is about the nature of guilt and innocence, and about the relations of people to nations.
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Capital Consequences: Families Of The Condemned Tell Their Stories: Rachel King
Those who support capital punishment often claim that they do so because it provides justice and closure for the victims' families. In Capital Consequences, attorney Rachel King reminds us that there are other families and other victims who are excluded from the death penalty debate, and who should be considered.
Combining a narrative voice with vivid, passionate, and painful accounts of the families of death row inmates, the book describes how crimes that lead to death sentences also devastate the families of those convicted. These families, King argues, are the unseen victims of capital punishment.
King challenges readers to question the morality of a punishment that victimizes families of the condemned, having a ripple effect, through future generations. She tells the stories of families that have lost life savings supporting an accused loved one, endured intense public scrutiny, been subjected to harassment by the media, and are struggling to live with the inhumane treatment that their loved ones receive on death row. The author also explores the unique nature of the grief that these families suffer. Because their pain tends to attract less attention and empathy than that of the crime victims' families, King shows how it becomes much more desperate and isolating.
On a human level, this book is a powerful reminder that tragic events have tragic consequences that far outreach their immediate victims. At the same time, the accounts illustrate many of the flaws inherent in the judicial system-racial and economic bias, incompetent counsel, prosecutorial misconduct, the execution of juveniles, and wrongful convictions, some of which are only now being overturned as a result of recent advances in DNA technology.
Regardless of which side of the death penalty issue you are on, this book will lead you to pause and consider that all acts-criminal and retributive-have broader human implications than we are sometimes willing to realize.
This book can also be purchased from Rutgers University Press
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Capitalist Punishment: Prison Privatization & Human Rights: Rodney Neufeld (Editor), Allison Campbell, Andrew Coyle (Editor)
"Only a few years ago, prison privatization was being touted as a cure-all
for the ills of penal systems around the world. Today, mired in
disappointing results and awash in scandals, the experiment in
privatization is in trouble. This compelling book shows, in illuminating
detail, why the experiment has not lived up to its promises."
Elliott Currie - author of Crime and Punishment in America
Available from Clarity Press, Inc. or through links below.
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Capital Punishment and the Bible: Gardner C. Hanks (Herald Press, February 2002)
This new book by Hanks explores the death penalty by reviewing biblical references to capital
punishment in their historical context and by examining the U.S.'s
current application of the death penalty in light of these scriptures.
This book is a follow-up to an earlier work by Hanks, "Against the Death
Penalty."
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Capital Punishment----Strategies for Abolition: Edited by Peter Hodgkinson, University of Westminster
William A. Schabas, National University of Ireland, Galway
What are the critical factors that determine whether a country replaces,
retains or restores the death penalty? Why do some countries maintain the
death penalty in theory but in reality rarely invoke it? By asking these
questions, the editors hope to isolate the core issues that influence the
formulation of legislation so that they can be incorporated into
strategies for advising governments considering changes to their policy on
capital punishment. They also seek to redress the current imbalance in
research, which tends to focus almost exclusively on the experience of the
USA, by covering a range of countries such as South Korea, Lithuania,
Japan and the British Caribbean Commonwealth. This valuable contribution
to the debates around capital punishment contains contributions from
leading academics, campaigners and legal practitioners and will be an
important resource for students, academics, NGOs, policy makers, lawyers
and jurists.
February 2004
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Catholics And The Death Penalty: Six Things Catholics Can Do To End Capital Punishment: Robert H. Hopcke
Priced affordably for easy distribution in bulk, this booklet introduces Catholics to six concrete things they can do to help end the death penalty. This explosive and divisive social issue demands fuller attention on all sides, in particular from ordinary Catholics who may be ardent supporters of other pro-life issues. Hopcke encourages readers to pray, read, attend meetings where death penalty issues are being discussed, write, witness to the truth, and donate to pro-life charities and organizations.
This book is also available for ordering through St. Anthony's
Messenger Press. Please contact Christopher Holmes in the marketing
dept., telephone: 513-241-5615, ext. 161, email:
cgholmes@americancatholic.org
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Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice: Howard J. Zehr
Zehr's classic work is the best introduction to the concepts of restorative justice.
"Changing Lenses" details the abuses of our current retributive justice system and
proposes a new (and old) biblical, practical and indispensible vision for a criminal
system that restores justice.
Zehr combines his theological and intellectual insights with his experience as founder
of the first victim-offender mediation program in the United States. No one interested
in mediation or criminal justice should be without this book.
(Reader Review)
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Chasing the Devil - My Twenty-Year Quest to Capture the Green River Killer : Sheriff David Reichert
The riveting personal account of one sheriffs epic hunt for Americas most heinous serial killer.
For eight years, Sheriff David Reichert devoted days and nights to capturing the Green River Killer--the most notorious serial killer in American history. He was the first detective on the case in 1982 and doggedly pursued it as the body count climbed to 49 and it became the most infamous unsolved case in the nation. Frantically following all leads, even as more bodies surfaced near the river outside Seattle, Sheriff Reichert befriended the victims families, publicly challenged the killer, and risked his own safety--and the endurance and love of his family--before he found his madman. But Reicherts hunt didnt end when he finally cornered a truck painter named Gary Ridgway. It would be yet another 11 haunting years before forensic science could prove Ridgways guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt.
CHASING THE DEVIL is the gripping firsthand account of Reicherts relentless pursuit--a 21-year odyssey full of near-misses and startling revelations. Told in vivid detail by the man who knows the whole story--the man who has stared into the eyes of absolute evil--this is a page-turning real-life suspense story of unparalleled heroism.
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A Checkered Past: William Van Poyke
This is an autobiography by Van Poyke, who was Frank Valdes' accomplice. (Valdes was murdered by Florida death row prison guards in
1999, and since then Van Poyke has lived on Virginia's death row.
In this sweeping, genre-blurring autobiography, [Van Poyke] guides
readers
through a vividly sketched tour, from privileged barefoot youth to reform
schools, prisons and death row.... This no-holds-barred, eye-opening saga
of human fallibility cuts close to the bone while resonating with life's
timeless themes of despair, hope and redemption."
This book may also be purchased from www.1stbooks.com (search the word "Past" under title) or call
800-839-8640.
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The Choice Is Yours: Shirley Dicks
A non fiction for kids from ten to twenty. A video by the
same name is also available filmed on Tennessee's death row.
In this book you will hear from some of the guys who are in prison, some who are on death row, who have done drugs, alcohol, been in gangs, committed robberies, killed and on and on. They will tell you about prison life and what it feels like to wait to die. To sit in a cell 24 hours a day and see the electric chair...knowing that one day they will be placed in it and will undergo the most horrible pain imaginable. All because they made the wrong choices in life.
Visit www.thechoiceisyours.org for ordering information and to read excerpts from the book
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Choosing Mercy: A Mother of Murder Victims Pleads to End the Death Penalty: Antoinette Bosco
Sometimes the most eloquent opponents of the death penalty are those who have the most obvious personal reasons
to demand this ultimate form of retribution: people who have lost loved ones in brutal, senseless crimes. In 1993
Bosco's son and his wife were shot and killed by an 18-year-old Montana neighbor. Bosco, a journalist, had long
opposed the death penalty, partly because of family history, but the Montana murders made the issue even more
central for her. Like some other family members of crime victims, Bosco found that forgiveness was an essential
element of healing. She got involved in victim support groups and then prison visitation, becoming an activist,
not simply for elimination of the death penalty, but also for radical reform of the prison system. Choosing
Mercy is a highly personal story, describing Bosco's experiences and those of other parents and relatives Bosco
has encountered in campaigning for a criminal justice system that would honor victims by blending justice with
mercy. A valuable supplement to more academic studies of this issue.
(Mary Carroll, Booklist)
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Circumstantial Evidence - Death, Life, and Justice in a Southern Town: Pete Earley (Walter McMillian's story)
A piercing, provocative true story that is also a commentary on our system of justice,
centred around a wrongful murder conviction that bares the dark side of the American soul. This book highlights a case that was front page news--featured on "60 Minutes, " in The New York Times in 1993.
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Congregation of the Condemned - Voices against the Death Penalty: Shirley Dicks
A collection of 49 essays calling for an end to the death penalty--by death-row inmates,
members of victims' families, legal and medical experts, religious and political figures
(e.g. Edward Kennedy, Mario Cuomo), journalists (e.g. Tom Wicker), entertainers
(e.g. Mike Farrell, Peter Gabriel), and spokespersons from such organizations as
Amnesty International, the NAACP (Coretta Scott King), and the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
(Book News)
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Come Walk With Me: Elaine Ruth Pope
"Come Walk With Me" is the true story about Horace Melvin Pope. It took the Author
several years to research and write it, but finally it can be
found at
www.xlibris.com/POPE.html>.
It is published in both soft cover and hard cover.
This is a story that will touch everyone who has a loved one behind prison walls.
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The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment: Franklin E. Zimring
Why does the United States continue to employ the death penalty when fifty other developed democracies have abolished it? Why does capital punishment become more problematic each year? How can the death penalty conflict be resolved? In The End of Capital Punishment in America, Frank Zimring reveals that the seemingly insoluble turmoil surrounding the death penalty reflects a deep and long-standing division in American values, a division that he predicts will soon bring about the end of capital punishment in our country. On the one hand, execution would seem to violate our nation's highest legal principles of fairness and due process. It sets us increasingly apart from our allies and indeed is regarded by European nations as a barbaric and particularly egregious form of American exceptionalism. On the other hand, the death penalty represents a deeply held American belief in violent social justice that sees the hangman as an agent of local control and safeguard of community values. Zimring uncovers the most troubling symptom of this attraction to vigilante justice in the lynch mob. He shows that the great majority of executions in recent decades have occurred in precisely those Southern states where lynchings were most common a hundred years ago. It is this legacy, Zimring suggests, that constitutes both the distinctive appeal of the death penalty in the United States and one of the most compelling reasons for abolishing it. Impeccably researched and engagingly written, The End of Capital Punishment in America casts a clear new light on America's long and troubled embrace of the death penalty.
(Editorial Review)
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Corpse: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint Time of Death: Jessica Snyder Sachs
Placing the time of death is very important in homicide investigations and in identifying decayed remains. Yet the exact measure of time of death has challenged people for the past 2000 years. The newly evolving multidisciplinary field of forensic ecology looks for ways to measure the time of death more accurately. Sachs, a freelance health and science writer, details the intricacies of human decay as it relates to deducing a time of death from a corpse. After reviewing the history of forensic pathology and the tradition of accurately or not so accurately placing the time of death, she explains the current state of the art. In particular, she concentrates on the use of clues such as maggots, plants, and pollens in and around the body to aid in the process. Sachs writes accessibly for the lay reader.
(source: Library Journal)
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The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment: Comparative Perspectives : Austin Sarat and Christian Boulanger (editors.)
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?
After centuries during which capital punishment was a normal and self-evident part of criminal punishment, it has now taken on a life of its own in various arenas far beyond the limits of the penal sphere. 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.
They undertake this "cultural voyage" comparatively—examining the dynamics of the death penalty in Mexico, the United States, Poland, Kyrgyzstan, India, Israel, Palestine, Japan, China, Singapore, and South Korea—arguing that we need to look beyond the United States to see how capital punishment "lives" or "dies" in the rest of the world, how images of state killing are produced and consumed elsewhere, and how they are reflected, back and forth, in the emerging international judicial and political discourse on the penalty of death and its abolition.
Contributors: Sangmin Bae Christian Boulanger Julia Eckert Agata Fijalkowski Evi Girling Virgil K.Y. Ho David T. Johnson Botagoz Kassymbekova Shai Lavi Jürgen Martschukat Alfred Oehlers Judith Randle Judith Mendelsohn Rood Austin Sarat Patrick Timmons Nicole Tarulevicz Louise Tyler--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Dancehall Ladies: Executed Women of the 20th Century: L. Kay Gillespie
In 1998, a mere six months after the publication of the first edition of "Dancehall Ladies", two more women were executed, adding to the previous total of 37 females executed by the United States. This revised edition includes their story, along with updated statistics. The book, filled with photographs that put faces with the statistics of capital punishment, examines the history of executed women in the United States. As the 20th century concludes, "Dancehall Ladies" provides powerful insight into America's dealings with women criminals in the past hundred years. It will certainly influence debate on the topic well into the new century.
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In a Dark Time: Dwight Harrison and Susannah Sheffer
Can a man return from an exile of his own making? Can he learn to
understand what he has done, and why?
"In a Dark Time" is the powerful story of a man's struggle to come to
terms with himself and his crimes.
A mix of psychology, literary memoir, and prison studies, the book
looks at the roots of violence and the struggle for rehabilitation in
a Massachusetts prisoner convicted of armed robbery and attempted
murder.
This book may also be obtained from Stone Lion Press
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Dead Man Walking: Ben Aronoff
"Dead Man Walking" is an autobiographical account of a regular guy who volunteers to tutor prisoners at the nearby prison - California's San
Quentin State Prison. After teaching murderers and child molesters the guitar, Ben Aronoff "crossed over" and became a guard and the Hobbycraft
Manager, before ultimately being "set up" and fired by those who did not like his compassionate attitude. The book does not deal with the death
penalty per se, but rather the condemned as students and long-time friends and collaborators. Aronoff's experiences in the book set the stage for his
future work with the condemned, and the life-changing experience of witnessing the execution of a very close friend.
Currently out of print, order this book by sending $15 payable to:
Ben Aronoff
P.O.Box 227
Sebastopol, Calif. 95473
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Dead Man Walking: Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ
A unique perspective on one of the greatest moral dilemmas in America, from a nun who works closely with both death-row inmates and the families of victims. Without denying the inmates' brutality, she nonetheless comes down squarely against institutionalized killing of criminals. "Sister Prejean...is an excellent writer, direct and honest and unsentimental; her accounts of crime and punishment are gripping, and her argument is persuasive" (NY Times Book Review)
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Dead Run - The Untold Story of Dennis Stockton and America's Only Mass Escape from Death Row: Joe Jackson, William F. Burke et al
 Dead Run is the stunning account of Dennis Stockton's life, using lengthy excerpts from his prison writings and told with harrowing immediacy by William F. Burke Jr., Stockton's editor at The Virginian-Pilot, and Joe Jackson, the reporter who investigated his unshakable claims of innocence. It is a riveting true-life thriller and an unforgettable, searing portrait of life on Death Row in America today
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Dead Wrong: A Death Row Lawyer Speaks Out Against Capital Punishment: Michael Mello
 A former fulltime capital public defender in Florida tells how the system works--and why it's wrong. "The real death penalty enterprise is a Rube Goldberg contraption kept clanking perpetually by the fuel of caffeinated lawyers and their cousins the poll-driven politicians. Michael Mello is a witness from inside the machine" (from the Foreword by David Von Drehle)
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Death and Justice: An Expose of Oklahoma's Death Row Machine: Mark Fuhrman - September 2003
Fuhrman thought he'd be a sympathetic observer when he decided to focus on conservative Oklahoma County while researching the death penalty. Little did he know that his own research would turn his views upside down. After the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, "frontier justice," as Fuhrman calls it, became the norm in Oklahoma. Overzealous law-enforcement officials would find a suspect and retrofit the evidence. Heading up this practice was the extremely popular D.A., Bob Macy, and his most trusted forensic scientist, Joyce Gilchrist. With the precision of a first-rate detective--which, O.J. notwithstanding, Fuhrman truly is--he breaks down several death-penalty cases that relied on rather questionable investigative techniques and considerably suspect scientific reasoning. When faced with the possibility that innocent people might have been executed at the hands of an overly ambitious prosecutorial machine, Fuhrman reconsiders his position on the matter: "Macy's career showed me the futility of vengeance. Evil cannot be met with evil, no matter how it is justified. The whole point of law enforcement is to serve justice, not your own ego, ambition, or pathology." With every offering, Fuhrman, once reviled, is showing himself to be a courageous man who dares to take on his own industry. Dominick Dunne, look out.
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Death by Design: Craig Haney
How can otherwise normal, moral persons --as citizens, voters, and jurors --participate in a process that is designed to take the life of another? In Death by Design, research psychologist Craig Haney argues that capital punishment, and particularly the sequence of events that lead to death sentencing itself, is maintained through a complex and elaborate social psychological system that distance and disengage us from the true nature of the task. Relying heavily on his own research and that of other social scientists, Haney suggests that these social psychological forces enable persons to engage in behavior from which many of them otherwise would refrain. However, by facilitating death sentencing in these ways, this inter-related set of social psychological forces also undermines the reliability and authenticity of the process, and compromises the fairness of its outcomes. Because these social psychological forces are systemic in nature --built into the very system of death sentencing itself --Haney concludes by suggesting a number of inter-locking reforms, derived directly from empirical research on capital punishment, that are needed to increase the fairness and reliability of the process.
The historic and ongoing public debate over the death penalty takes place not only in courtrooms, but also in classrooms, offices, and living rooms. This timely book offers stimulating insights into capital punishment for professionals and students working in psychology, law, criminology, sociology, and cultural area studies. As capital punishment receives continued attention in the media, it is also a necessary and provocative guide that empowers all readers to come to their own conclusions about the death penalty.
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The Death Game - Capital Punishment and the Luck of the Draw: Mike Gray (April 2003)
In 1998, Mike Gray changed the political landscape with his book Drug
Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and how we can get out. His book is
credited with turning the staunch Republican Governor of New Mexico
against the drug war.
Now, with The Death Game, he is destined to transform the terrain of
criminal justice.
Written with the power of a gritty novel, this documentary on the
death penalty shows why justice and capital punishment don't mix. Mike
Gray zeros in on issues of police brutality, pressures on prosecutors and
judges seeking career advancement, and the frailty of eyewitness accounts.
INTRO BY Rudolph Gerber, retired judge who crafted Arizona's death
penalty law in the 1970s after his boss, the future Supreme Court Justice
Sandra Day O'Connor, asked him for "A death penalty law we can live with."
FOREWORD BY sitting Judge Daniel Gaul, Common Pleas Court of Cleveland
Available from Common Courage Press or through links below.
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Death in the Dark: Midnight Executions in America: by John D. Bessler (1997)
 Public executions were once a fixture of American society, explains the author of this well-researched history of capital punishment in the United States. It was commonplace for the condemned to be hanged in the public commons in full view of a boisterous crowd. But by the 1820s, attitudes had changed. Rather than ceasing executions, the lawmakers moved them inside the prisons where, to this day, they are carried out with few witnesses. Bressler, an authority on constitutional law, contends that these private executions, usually carried out after midnight, shield Americans from the reality of the death penalty. He argues that executions should be televised so that they would be as public as in the old days. He feels that with a clear view of state-sanctioned killings, people would perhaps have a different attitude about them. This chilling and well-argued work is highly recommended for crime collections. Frances O. Sandiford, Green Haven Correctional Facility Lib., Stormville, N.Y.
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The Death of Innocents : An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions: Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ
Activist nun Prejean, whose crusade against the death penalty became widely known after Susan Sarandon portrayed her in the Oscar-winning film adaptation of her first book, Dead Man Walking, has again crafted a passionate indictment of the American criminal justice system. This time, with gripping, heartrending detail, Prejean draws on her experience advocating for two men she believes to have been innocent, but who were condemned to death row—Dobie Gillis Williams and Joseph O'Dell. While the book's subtitle removes any element of suspense, few readers will miss it. Instead, many will be outraged at a "machinery of death" weighted against the poor and African-Americans, featuring technical obstacles placed in the way of men desperately fighting for a fair hearing of evidence never elicited at their trials (O'Dell was denied appellate review by the highest court in Virginia because his lawyers typed one wrong word on his petition's title page). Prejean's tale involves a tragic, but not atypical, confluence of aggressive prosecutors (such as those in Louisiana, who display a "Big Prick" award featuring the state bird clutching in its talons a hypodermic needle used in lethal injections in its talons) and inept, ill-trained and apathetic defense attorneys. This damning critique should make even supporters of capital punishment pause, and the author's celebrity status, coupled with a timely message, should propel this onto bestseller lists.
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Death Nation: The Experts Explain American Capital Punishment: By Matthew B. Robinson
Based on empirical evidence, Death Nation offers a fair and reasoned analysis of capital punishment as it is actually practiced in the United States. It includes a discussion of death penalty history, an analysis of the death penalty law and a discussion of various policy implications. Rather than present philosophical or moral arguments, it presents findings from a survey administered to dozens of capital punishment experts throughout the United States. Included in the book are fact check sections that analyze these expert opinions for accuracy based on available empirical evidence. Examines important questions such as: Do executions reduce murder?; Is capital punishment biased against any race, gender, or class of people?; Is the death penalty used against the innocent?; Is the application of the death penalty plagued by significant problem?; Why is the United States the only western industrialized nation to continue to carry out executions? Uses empirical evidencerather than philosophical or moral arguments, to analyze the realities of the death penalty as it is actually practiced in the United States. Captures and presents the opinions of capital punishment experts with regard to the effectiveness of the death penalty in America, as well as its alleged problems. Anyone interested in capital punishment within the United States and those involved with death penalty policies and states that maintain capital punishment
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The Death Penalty: An American History: Stuart Banner
 In this well-researched and clear account,
Washington University law professor Banner charts how and why this country went from having one of the world's mildest punitive systems to one of its harshest.
In colonial America, criminals were hanged before large crowds in elaborate rituals that included sermons and prayers.
All serious crimes robbery, arson, counterfeiting were capital offenses.
But gradually, opposition to execution took root and, by the 1780s, it was considered by many to be a feudal relic incompatible with human progress; resulting penal reforms significantly reduced the use of capital punishment. By the Civil War, a prolonged debate led three northern states to abolish it, while the rest limited its application to murderers (the South's opinions on the matter remained more or less unchanged). As 19th-century "elites" withdrew from the crowds at public executions, the mood turned against them altogether; when executions were moved inside prison walls, they no longer presented the public with their traditional (and gruesome) brand of deterrence. But, as Banner shows, in the last few decades, the number of executions has surged. Today, he contends, the death penalty is "an emotionally charged political issue administered within a legal framework so unworkable that it satisfie[s] no one." Publishers Weekly.
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The Death Penalty - An Historical and Theological Survey: James Megivern
 This original, timely and definitive study will be an important resource for both scholars and the general public. The Death Penalty includes more information on the history of thinking about capital punishment than is available in any other English work.
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The Death Penalty In America: Hugo Adam Bedau
In The Death Penalty in America: Current Controversies, Hugo Adam Bedau, one of our
pre-eminent scholars on the subject, provides a comprehensive source-book on the death penalty, making the process of informed consideration not only possible but fascinating as well. No mere revision of the third edition of The Death Penalty in America (1982) this volume brings together an entirely new selection of 40 essays and includes updated statistical and research data, recent Supreme Court decisions, and the best current contributions to the debate over capital punishment. From the status of the death penalty worldwide to current attitudes of Americans toward convicted killers, from legal arguments challenging the constitutionality of the death penalty to moral arguments enlisting the New Testament in support of it, from controversies over the role of race and class in the judicial system to proposals to televise executions, Bedau gathers readings that explore all the most compelling aspects of this most compelling issue.
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Death Penalty in a Nutshell: (Nutshell Series) Victor Streib
Covering both the substantive law and the procedural law of the death
penalty, this title begins with the arguments for and against the death
penalty and an explanation of its basic constitutional challenges and
limitations. Major sections cover capital crimes and defenses, as well as
trial level and post-trial procedural issues. Special topics such as race
and gender bias and executing the innocent are included, as well as a
section on international and foreign law issues. This Nutshell serves both
as supplemental reading for students in death penalty courses and as a
concise, narrative explanation of death penalty law.
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The Death Penalty on Trial (crisis in American Justice): Bill Kurtis
Bill Kurtis, anchor of the wildly popular true-crime TV series Cold Case Files and American Justice, used to support the death penalty. But after observing the machinations of the justice system for X years, he came to a stunning realization that changed his life: Capital punishment is wrong. There can be no real justice in America until it is abolished.
In Death Penalty on Trial, Kurtis takes readers on his most remarkable investigative journey yet. Together, we revisit murder scenes, study the evidence, and explore the tactical decisions made before and during trial, which sent innocent people to death row. We examine the eight main reasons why the wrong people are condemned to death, including overzealous and dishonest prosecutors, corrupt policemen, unreliable witnesses and expert witnesses, incompetent defense attorneys, bias judges, and jailhouse informants. We see why the new jewel of forensic science, DNA, is revealing more than innocence and guilt, opening a window into the criminal justice system that could touch off a revolution of reform. Ultimately we come to a remarkable conclusion: The possibility for error in our justice system is simply too great to allow the death penalty to stand as our ultimate punishment.
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The Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective: Roger Hood (January
2003)
This is the completely revised and updated third edition of Roger Hood's classic study on the death penalty. In it he surveys and analyses the status of the death penalty as a punishment worldwide, taking into account the changes that have taken place during the six years since the last edition was published. This new edition is especially valuable at a time when more and more countries are joining the movement to abolish the death penalty worldwide.
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Death Row Chaplain: Rev. Byron E. Eshelman, Frank Riley
Rev. Mr. Eshelman was the supervising and protestant (United Church of
Christ) chaplain at San Quentin, CA, from 1951 through 1971.
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Death Row Defender: Ray Dix
This intelligently written mystery holds your attention on a number of levels.
It certainly is an "eye-opener" for the average citizen in regards to our perception
of "justice", law, and the death penalty. Even if you have no opinion at all (really?)
on the subject, reading this book should definitely give you pause. If you just love a
good mystery and don't care a fig about death row, the book will hook you in quickly. You do want to know what will happen next and it makes you care about the characters. If you are a Floridian and a Pinellas County resident in particular, or even just the occasional visitor, you will also enjoy the Margaritaville flavor and revisiting familiar places.
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From Death Row With Love: By Margot Aczel
From Death Row with Love depicts the journey undertaken by Margôt to discover the life of
one man on Death Row in Texas. She meets Ted Cole, a convicted double murderer,
who has been on death row for a number of years, at the request made by her friend
Sister Elder. This journey of discovery is related in a candid way and the reader
is often left asking the question "why?" Why are the prisoners kept in such inhumane
conditions? Why are they treated the way they are? Why? Why? Why? These questions
continue to flood the mind of the reader, who is left with no real answer at the end of
the book, except to want to do something to help.
The book contains more than 400 pages, together with poems and photos. It
has also a special introduction by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-OConnor,
Archbishop of Westminster.
This book is published by Pirata Publications and is available directly from:
Margôt Aczel
Marine Crescent,
Deganwy,
Conway County,
LL31 9BY, UK.
For further information, please contact Margôt Aczel margotaczel@totalise.co.uk
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Death Work: A Study of the Modern Execution Process: Robert Johnson (Wadsworth,l998, 2nd edition)
This text is a frank and unsettling look at the consequences of the death penalty in the United States.
The author takes the reader on a compelling, step-by-step journey through the world of American executions,
from the prisoners who spend years on death row to the prison staff who guard the condemned and the people who are executioners.
Utilizing both ethnographic and quantitative research, this book creates a dramatic presentation of all sides of this controversial topic
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Deathwork: Defending the Condemned: Michael Mello
Legal cases are stories, and some of the most compelling and the most
disturbing are those that take place on death row: the innocent man
executed, juveniles and the mentally ill condemned to die, a smoking
electric chair, a napping defense attorney, a senile hit man. These are
the stories in which Michael Mello, as a capital public defender, played a
crucial role, and they are the cases that make up Deathwork, a
moment-by-moment, behind-the-scenes look at the life and work of a death
row lawyer and his clients.
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Defending Civil Resistance Under International Law: Francis Anthony Boyle
This book is a must for any person who has taken part in a civil resistance action, or who has contemplated doing so. See how this defense can not only give you your best chance to avoid jail, but can also advance the cause for which you risked arrest.
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Defending Mohammad, Justice on Trial: Robert E. Precht
This is the inside story of an epic courtroom showdown between terrorism and the American legal system. On a snowy day in February 1993, a massive car bomb nearly toppled the World Trade Center. Four Middle Eastern men were quickly arrested and charged with the crime. At the time, Robert E. Precht was a staff attorney for the Legal Aid Society Federal Defender Division in Manhattan, handling routine cases as a public defender. He was surprised to be appointed defense attorney to the chief suspect, Mohammad Salameh, and challenged as never before by the media circus that this major terrorism trial would prove to be. The events and personalities of the trial make for gripping reading, but equally compelling are Precht’s observations on the forces arrayed against fair trials for accused terrorists.
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Desire Street : A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans
: Jed Horne
"What Jed Horne does in this book is show you a right and wrong that runs beside guilt and innocence like the New Orleans streetcar runs beside heavy traffic. In a state and an area where the lines of the law have blurred into wrongdoing for two centuries, Horne takes a modern-day case and shows what can happen when a rush to convict overrides the protections of the system. Grippingly written, it leaves you with a shaken sense of a system we need to believe in." --Rick Bragg, author of All Over But the Shoutin'
"Desire Street is an absorbing story of the life-and-death legal battle that follows a murder. Told from different perspectives, it becomes a window into the horrific flesh-and-blood workings of the criminal justice system, where prejudice, politics, and professional ambitions--more than anything else--shape what passes for justice today. Unfortunately, the nightmarish world Horne reveals isn’t unique to New Orleans, nor to Louisiana." --Wilbert Rideau, editor of The Angolite, the inmate publication of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola
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The Devil's Playground - Behind Prison Walls: Shirley Dicks
As the mother of a man who spent more than 15 years on Tennessee’s death row and then died of neglect in prison before his sentence was ever carried out, Shirley Dicks has many years of bitter experience with America’s penal system. In this book she presents a graphic and disturbing insider’s view of the many abuses that occur behind prison walls. Based not only on what she witnessed firsthand in almost daily visits to her son, but also on information from her many contacts in the prison-reform network, Dicks describes three main areas of persistent abuse that cry out for attention: medical neglect, as a result of which many prisoners, like her son, die prematurely from serious, untreated conditions like heart disease, cancer, and AIDS; sexual abuse of both male and female prisoners, not only by fellow inmates but by predatory guards; and the general environment of sadism and brutality, which all too often characterizes the treatment of prisoners by guards and supervisors.
Dicks argues that these terrible conditions only encourage the violence and lawlessness for which many prisoners were originally incarcerated, and they turn those jailed for minor offenses into hardened criminals who see no alternative to a life of crime. She concludes with suggestions for reform including educational options for nonviolent prisoners to give them a chance to become responsible self-supporting citizens after their release.
For all who care about improving our justice system and seriously addressing the cycle of crime, Dick’s critical, shocking account is a must read.
Prometheus New Releases - Late 2002, 345 pages ISBN 1-59102-039-5 HC $26 (6” x 9”)
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Don't Kill In Our Names: Families of
Murder Victims Speak Out Against the Death Penalty: Rachel King
Rachel King, well known attorney in Washington DC is the author of this book which features many MVFR stories such as Bill Pelke, Marietta Jaegar, Jennifer Bishop, SueZann Bosler and others....
(Rutgers University
Press, 800-446-9323).
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Our Endangered Values : America's Moral Crisis: Jimmy Carter
Evangelical Christians in this country are familiar with the jeremiad, a sermon rousing the devout to renewed effort by highlighting how far they have wandered from the true and only faith. These days, jeremiads invariably attribute the abysmal crisis in which America allegedly finds itself to liberals and secular humanists. Teenage pregnancy, abortion, drug addiction, homosexuality -- these, we are told, are indications of our fallen state, the product of our mistaken belief that we can get by without the teachings of a just God.
Jimmy Carter's natural affinity is with the jeremiad. But Our Endangered Values, the prolific ex-president's latest book, finds fault not with secular humanists but with Christians, particularly those of the fundamentalist persuasion. Huge gaps between rich and poor, disrespect for human rights, cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners, a despoiled environment and a dangerous foreign policy -- these, for him, are the true indications of how far we have fallen. We used to believe that America stood as a moral beacon to the world. Because of the influence wielded by fundamentalists over our policies, Carter argues, we no longer can.
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Evolving Standards of Decency: Popular Culture and Capital Punishment: Mary Welek Atwell
The Supreme Court has looked to "evolving standards of decency" in determining whether the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. Evolving Standards of Decency examines the ways in which popular culture portrays the death penalty. By analyzing literature and film, Atwell argues that capital punishment becomes much more complex when both offenders and victims are presented as fully developed individuals. Numerous books and films from the last several decades expose flaws in the criminal justice system and provide audiences with stories that raise questions about race, class, and actual innocence in the administration of the ultimate punishment. Although most people will not read legal briefs supporting or challenging the death penalty, many will see films or read novels that raise issues about its fairness. Themes and images gathered through popular culture may ultimately influence whether Americans continue to believe that capital punishment conforms to their evolving standards of decency and justice. Those studying justice issues, corrections, or capital punishment will find this an accessible and provocative work that places the stories read in novels or seen in movies in the context of the legal system that has the power of life and death.
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Executed on a Technicality : Lethal Injustice on America's Death Row: David R. Dow
When David Dow took his first capital case, he supported the death penalty. He changed his position as the men on death row became real people to him, as he came to witness the profound injustices they endured: from coerced confessions to disconcertingly incompetent lawyers; from racist juries and backward judges to a highly arbitrary death penalty system.
Dow"s eye-opening book is captivating because he allows the men, and their cases, to speak for themselves. For instance, one inmate"s lawyer literally slept through his trial; another inmate was executed because the jury never heard from two eyewitnesses who swore he was no the murderer; and yet another inmate was allowed to represent himself at trial despite the fact that his mental imbalance, which included attempts to issue a subpoena to Jesus Christ, was evident.
It is these concrete accounts of the people Dow has known and represented that prove the death penalty is consistently unjust, and it"s precisely this fundamental—and lethal—injustice, Dow argues, that should compel us to abandon the system altogether.
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An Execution in the Family: One Son's Journey: Robert Meeropol
Robert Meeropol was six years old in 1953 when his parents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, were executed after being convicted of Conspiracy to Commit Espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union at the height of the McCarthy era. Just before they were put to death, the Rosenbergs wrote a letter to their two sons saying they were “secure in the knowledge that others would carry on after them.”
The Rosenbergs left their young sons a legacy that was both a burden and a gift, as well as an aching emotional void. Robert Meeropol grew up torn between the need to pursue his political values and his intense fear that personal exposure might subject him and his family to violence or even death.
An Execution in the Family details Robert Meeropol’s political odyssey from being the Rosenbergs’son to becoming a prominent political activist in his own right, and it chronicles a very personal journey of self-discovery. This is the story of how he tried to balance a strong desire to live a normal life and raise a family with a growing need to create something useful out of his childhood nightmare. It is also a poignant account of how, at age forty-three, he finally found a way to honor his parents and be true to himself
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The Execution of a Serial Killer: One Man's Experience Witnessing the Death Penalty: Joseph D. Diaz, Ph.D
In December of 2000, a young criminologist stared into the face of a serial
killer as the man was executed. Unwittingly, the researcher became his own
subject when he found himself emotionally unprepared for the brutality of
capital punishment. A psychological crash, bordering on insanity, resulted
as the author confronted his own feelings about life, death, and his
religious faith.
In The Execution of a Serial Killer: One Man's Experience Witnessing the
Death Penalty, Dr. Diaz exposes the haunting mind of a deranged and violent
serial killer and the origins of the criminal's deadly urges. He transports
the reader to a front row seat inside the death chamber of the Florida
State Prison, revealing how it feels to witness an execution, and
challenging all to ask themselves, "Could I witness an execution?"
This book tells the true story of the events that led to these two lives
converging that night in Florida. It describes the life and the death of a
serial killer, and the impact his execution had on a witness the killer
never even knew.
* The Execution of a Serial Killer is hardcover, has 242 pages, and is
available from Poncha Press for $22.95 + $3.95 shipping (via Priority
Mail). To order, call 1-888-350-1445 ext. #1, or go to
www.ponchapress.com.
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Execution Protocol: Steven Trombley
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An Expendable Man: The Near-Execution of Earl Washington Jr.: Margaret Edds, Julian Ann Baldick (available August 2003)
"Read this book. Whether you support or oppose the death penalty, you need to understand what almost happened to a man named Earl Washington. Margaret Edds tells his tragic, arresting story with remarkable sensitivity and a clear-eyed understanding of the stakes not just for Earl Washington, but for all of us."
(Larry J. Sabato, Director, Center for Politics, University of Virginia)
How is it possible for an innocent man to come within nine days of execution? An Expendable Man answers that question through detailed analysis of the case of Earl Washington Jr., a mentally retarded, black farm hand who was convicted of the 1983 rape and murder of a 19-year-old mother of three in Culpeper, Virginia. He spent almost 18 years in Virginia prisons—9 1/2 of them on death row—for a murder he did not commit.
This book reveals the relative ease with which individuals who live at society's margins can be wrongfully convicted, and the extraordinary difficulty of correcting such a wrong once it occurs.
Washington was eventually freed in February 2001 not because of the legal and judicial systems, but in spite of them. While DNA testing was central to his eventual pardon, such tests would never have occurred without an unusually talented and committed legal team and without a series of incidents that are best described as pure luck.
Margaret Edds makes the chilling argument that some other "expendable men" almost certainly have been less fortunate than Washington. This, she writes, is "the secret, shameful underbelly" of America's retention of capital punishment. Such wrongful executions may not happen often, but anyone who doubts that innocent people have been executed in the United States should remember the remarkable series of events necessary to save Earl Washington Jr. from such a fate.
(Editorial Review)
This book may also be purchased from the New York University Press
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Field Notes On the Compassionate Life: Marc Ian Barasch
Writing in a friendly, upbeat voice, Barasch (Healing Dreams) is never pious as he ponders the meaning of compassion, its healing properties and the wisdom of the compassionate, from St. Francis and the Dalai Lama to caring individuals in Barasch's own life. Touching on psychology, social science and evolutionary biology, Barasch, former editor-in-chief of New Age Journal, explores his theme in a lively autobiographical style, with firsthand reportage, such as living temporarily as a homeless person. The compassionate life is not only liberating, it genuinely feels good, he says. But how do we overcome our innately self-serving tendencies? Barasch finds among bonobo chimpanzees a model for caring group behavior that he believes undermines Darwin's evolutionary idea of the survival of the fittest. He reports on new research that shows how love and caring may actually drive the bodily system, and he converses with an extraordinarily altruistic kidney donor and a father who has forgiven the killer of his daughter. He also observes an Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative, and reconciliations in Rwanda. Melding accessible reportage with spiritual quest, Barasch's stirring account is thought-provoking and inspiring.
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Forgiving the Dead Man Walking: Debbie Morris
 A true, first-person account of the victim who survived the crimes committed by the rapist and killer made famous in the movie Dead Man Walking. Debbie Morris takes readers beyond the story of those crimes and into the journey of her faith as she wrestles with the question all of us face at some point in life: Is there any crime, any hurt, any person beyond the power of forgiveness?
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Freeing the Innocent - How we did it: Michael and Betty Pardue
Michael says he was falsely accused of three capital murders after
being coerced into a false confession. While in jail he met and
married his wife, Becky, who helped get the charges dropped, and
Michael was released after serving 28 years in prison for a crime he
did not commit. Michael and Becky co-wrote Freeing the Innocent - How
We Did It: A Handbook for the Wrongly Convicted based on their
experiences, in order to help other people who have been wrongfully
accused and convicted of crimes.
Click here for additional details and ordering information.
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Frontiers of Justice - Volume 1: Death Penalty: Claudia Whitman & Julie Zimmerman (Eds.)
Frontiers Of Justice: The Death Penalty is an impressive anthology on the subject of capital punishment. The contributors represent men and women of conscience, including those incarcerated (as well as their families) and those free (including the families of crime victims). They are united to decry the use of the death penalty to resolve criminal justice problems in the American judicial system. Some of the contributors are drawn from the criminal justice system, government, religion, journalism, and humanist advocacy. Others are ordinary people whose lives have been touched by violence, including the act of murder. Frontiers Of Justice: The Death Penalty is a welcome and coherent contribution to today's on-going national debate over the use (and abuse) of the death penalty as an instrument of social justice and public safety. (Internet Book Watch)
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Frontiers of Justice - Volume 2: Coddling or Common Sense: Claudia Whitman, Julie Zimmerman & Tekla Miller (Eds.)
This volume is a unique collection of articles which stress the wide variety of common sense programs which have been put into place in communities and in prisons all over the nation.
These programs and the people involved in them don't care about the appearance of coddling criminals. The well chosen, well written, personalized essays remind us that we are on the edge of a wave, and that programs such as those presented can hasten our journeys toward justice, humanity and understanding.
The articles are interspersed with excerpts from inmates' letters which show, according to editor Julie Zimmerman, "far better than I could explain, that convicted criminals are people, not criminal acts, not monsters, not dispensable." There are also poems and drawings which cause you to stop and actually think about the creators and their ideas.
The diversity of the authors and their backgrounds is awesome. Among the authors are a former warden, a death row prisoner, a prison administrator, the President of the American Correctional Association, the President of a Consulting Business, a Department of Corrections Command Manager, an environmental researcher, two police officers, a crime victim, a warden, an educational consultant, a physician, two ministers, and volunteers.
(Sheila & G, Maroney)
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Frontiers of Justice - Volume 3: The Crime Zone: Claudia Whitman (Editor)
An absorbing account from the experts, the prisoners. Without blaming others for their circumstances, they prove that offenders should be incarcerated AS punishment, not FOR punishment. Their stunning stories reinforce the often ignored fact that each of us could be caught in The Crime Zone.
(Tekla Miller, Warden, Huron Valley (MI) Men's and Women's maximum security prisons (1985-1991)
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The Garden of Martyrs: Michael White
The Garden of Martyrs is based on a true story of the terrible injustice done to two
Irish-Catholic immigrants, Dominic Daley and James Halligan, who were
tried and convicted for the 1805 murder of a Yankee farmboy in
Massachusetts. With parallels to the Sacco-Vanzetti trial a century
later, the Daley-Halligan case set off a firestorm of controversy about
Irish-Catholics immigrating into this Protestant nation and causing
problems. It brought to a head the ever-present animosities and
prejudices Americans had felt for Catholics. It also involved Father Jean
Cheverus, who fled France during the Reign of Terror. Father Cheverus not
only gave spiritual comfort to the two prisoners but worked hard to
establish the New England Catholic Diocese and to overcome the
anti-Catholic prejudice and hatred in the 23 years of his tenure in Boston.
In 1984, the Daley-Halligan case was highlighted when Governor Michael
Dukakis (later the Democratic presidential nominee) pardoned the two men,
citing the anti-Irish prejudice and anti-Catholic religious animosity that
prevailed before, during, and after the trial.
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Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America’s Prisons: Alan Elsner
Alan Elsner’s powerful book demonstrates that our $40 billion corrections system for both adults and juveniles is
badly broken. Our jails and prisons and penitentiaries are failing us at enormous cost in money and in danger to
society. Elsner makes an overwhelming case for reform, and his many sensible proposals deserve to be implemented.
This book should be a wake-up call for federal, state, and local governments across America.
--Senator Edward M. Kennedy
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A Hanging in Detroit: Stephen Gifford Simmons and the Last Execution under Michigan Law: David G. Chardavoyne
On September 24, 1830, Stephen G. Simmons, a fifty-year-old tavern keeper and farmer, was hanged in Detroit for murdering his wife, Levana Simmons, in a drunken, jealous rage. Michigan executed only two people during the fifty-year period, from 1796 to 1846, when the death penalty was legal within its boundaries. Simmons was the second and last person to be executed under Michigan law. In "A Hanging in Detroit" David G. Chardavoyne vividly evokes not only the crime, trial, and execution of Simmons, but also the setting and players of the drama, social and legal customs of the times, and the controversy that arose because of the affair. Chardavoyne illuminates his account of this important moment in Michigan's history with many little-known facts, creating a study that is at once an engrossing story and the first historical examination of the event that helped bring about the abolition of the death penalty in Michigan.
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The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler - A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America: Irene Quenzler Brown, Richard D. Brown
In 1806 an anxious crowd of thousands descended upon Lenox, Massachusetts, for the public hanging of Ephraim Wheeler, condemned for the rape of his thirteen-year-old daughter, Betsy. Not all witnesses believed justice had triumphed. The death penalty had become controversial; no one had been executed for rape in Massachusetts in more than a quarter century. Wheeler maintained his innocence. Over one hundred local citizens petitioned for his pardon--including, most remarkably, Betsy and her mother.
Impoverished, illiterate, a failed farmer who married into a mixed-race family and clashed routinely with his wife, Wheeler existed on the margins of society. Using the trial report to reconstruct the tragic crime and drawing on Wheeler's jailhouse autobiography to unravel his troubled family history, Irene Quenzler Brown and Richard D. Brown illuminate a rarely seen slice of early America. They imaginatively and sensitively explore issues of family violence, poverty, gender, race and class, religion, and capital punishment, revealing similarities between death penalty politics in America today and two hundred years ago.
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The Hangman's Knot: Lynching, Legal Execution, and America's Struggle with the Death Penalty: Eliza Steelwater (Westview Press, July 2003)
In The Hangman's Knot: Lynching, Legal Execution, and America's Struggle with the Death Penalty, Eliza Steelwater presents a fascinating history of execution in the United States, from colonial times to the present. With a compelling narrative and gripping personal stories, she documents how this debate became one of the most contentious of our time. The author, a veteran death-penalty researcher and co-founder of Project HAL (Historical American Lynching), shows that the answer to the death penalty's future lies in a discussion of its past.
Using information from Project HAL and the authoritative Capital Punishment Research Project - including records of over 15,000 legal executions and 4,500 lynchings nationwide - Steelwater delivers a vivid understanding that America's unparalleled and powerful 200-year-old policy of execution as "punishment politics" is alive and well today. Bringing a fresh perspective to the death-penalty debate, she demonstrates that execution has often had less to do with crimes committed than with the political and economic ambitions of those who controlled the punishment system.
Visit www.hangmansknot.com for more information on this book.
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Have a Seat, Please: Don Reid
 Don Reid witnessed 189 electrocutions during his 35 years covering the Texas prison system for Associated Press. He describes his experiences and tells the stories of many men executed, recounting his transformation from a supporter of capital punishment to a national spokesman for the abolition of the death penalty. This book was first published 35 years ago under the title . Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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The Haven - A True Story of Life in the Hole: : Richard Dubé
The Haven is a true story of how a convicted murderer did his time. Richard Dubé fought the system, and paid the price.
In Millhaven Penitentiary (Ontario, Canada), he logged 400 days in the Hole.
There he plotted how to get revenge on his keepers, on the police who put him in jail, and fellow inmates who crossed him.
Only at his darkest moment does redemption come.
Raw, graphic and powerful, The Haven takes you behind prison walls where life has no value and survival is everything.
Available from Chapters.
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Hidden Victims - The Effects Of The Death Penalty On Families Of The Accused : Susan F. Sharp
In Hidden Victims, sociologist Susan F. Sharp challenges this culturally ingrained perspective by reminding us that those individuals facing a death sentence, in addition to being murderers, are brothers or sisters, mothers or fathers, daughters or sons, relatives or friends. Through a series of vivid and in-depth interviews with families of the accused, she demonstrates how the exceptionally severe way in which we view those on death row trickles down to those with whom they are closely connected. Sharp shows how family members and friends-in effect, the indirect victims of the initial crime-experience a profoundly complicated and socially isolating grief process.
Departing from a humanist perspective from which most accounts of victims are told, Sharp makes her case from a sociological standpoint that draws out the parallel experiences and coping mechanisms of these individuals. Chapters focus on responses to sentencing, the particular structure of grieving faced by this population, execution, aftermath, wrongful conviction, family formation after conviction, and the complex situation of individuals related to both the killer and the victim.
Powerful, poignant, and intelligently written, Hidden Victims challenges all of us-regardless of which side of the death penalty you are on-to understand the economic, social, and psychological repercussions that shape the lives of the often forgotten families of death row inmates.
This book can also be purchased from Rutgers University Press
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Human Sacrifice.: James Moore
The fruits of a 10 year research into the murder of Sarah Cherry and the life sentence
given to Dennis Dechaine. The author, a retired ATF agent, presents his case for the
innocence of Dennis Dechaine and the travesty of a trial put on by local law enforcement
officials.
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Incarceration Nation: Investigative Prison Poems of Hope and Terror: Stephen John Hartnett
Merging the evocative power of poetry with scholarly research,
Incarceration Nation offers a genre-bending critique of the
prison-industrial-complex. Based on ten years of teaching in, writing
about, and protesting at prisons across America, Incarceration Nation
weaves together the hopes of prisoners, their families, and friends with
the stories of activist communities struggling against the death penalty,
the war on drugs, and a culture that treats prisoners as
commodities. While offering critical insight into how the
prison-industrial-complex compromises democracy in America, these poems
also celebrate the tenacity and genius of those citizens fighting for
justice. Full of materials from philosophers, poets, and historians, rich
in personal detail, and written as a passionate and urgent call for
justice, Incarceration Nation gives voice to the hopes and horrors of a
generation confronted by the mass-production of criminality.
"Hartnett's dazzlingly original book offers a poetry of engagement, of
vision becoming practice. This is a major achievement."
Peter Dale Scott, U.C. Berkeley, and author of Coming to Jakarta: A Poem
About Terror
"Incarceration Nation honors the names and words of real people living
their lives behind bars, includes the speech of those we pay to guard
them, shares what Hartnett's eyes have seen, and calls on thinkers and
poets from Rousseau to Debs to Whitman."
Judith Tannenbaum, author of Disguised as a Poem:
My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin Prison
Incarceration Nation can also be ordered direct from AltaMira Press at 1-800-462-6420,
or on-line at www.altamirapress.com
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Innocent: Inside Wrongful Conviction Cases: Scott Christianson
A chilling chronicle of what can happen when the criminal justice system goes awry, Christianson's volume documents 42 cases in which an innocent person was sentenced for a crime that she or he didn't commit. An investigative reporter who specializes in the American prisons, Christianson (With Liberty for Some; Condemned) finds the usual evils in our beleaguered, bureaucratic judicial system-prejudiced juries, mistaken identification, ineffective counsel. More frightening, however, are the cases that he reveals involve deliberate institutional corruption-false confessions, fabrication of evidence or misconduct by police or prosecutors. Despite the publicity surrounding the recent exoneration of some prisoners who were freed after the reconsideration of DNA evidence, many wrongfully convicted people still remain incarcerated. The powerful and compelling stories of such innocent victims carry this book, which is otherwise rather shoddily assembled-the anecdotes and photographs lack cohesion or orderly arrangement. Readers may be frustrated by the book's episodic structure and lack of narrative unity, but the subject is an undeniably important one.
The 42 cases collected and graphically documented in Innocent tell the story of just such wrongful conviction cases. Based upon interviews with more than 200 people and reviews of hundreds of internal case files, court records, smoking-gun memoranda and other documents, Scott Christianson gets inside the legal cases and displays them through documents and images of the people and evidence involved. He reveals the mistakes, abuses and underlying factors that led to miscarriages of justice, including the presumption of guilt, mistaken identification, eyewitness perjury, ineffective assistance of counsel, police misconduct, prosecutorial misconduct, and forensics, while also describing how determined prisoners, post-conviction attorneys, advocates and journalists struggled against tremendous odds to win their exonerations.
Some of the defendants in Innocent are still in prison, trying to prove their innocence to the courts. Others have had their convictions reversed and the charges against them dismissed, and still others have been awarded civil damages after the state conceded their innocence. The result is a brief and powerful work that recounts the human costs of a criminal justice system gone awry, and reminds us that wrongful convictions can—and do—happen
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The Innocents: Taryn Simon (Photographer), Peter Neufeld (Commentary)
This collection of photographs and oral histories of fifty men and women gathered from
across the United States forcefully describes a judicial system most of us would not
recognize, where corrupt prosecutors, sleeping lawyers, bent cops, and jailhouse snitches
subvert the most fundamental principles of justice. Photographer Taryn Simon and leading
attorneys Neufeld and Scheckk bring us face-to-face with individuals falsely accused and
convicted. Through Simon's portraits and interviews, their personal testimonies lay bare
the paradox of innocence and imprisonment, the inability to recover the years stolen from
them, and the states' unconscionable refusal to compensate them or to ease their
traumatic transition to civilian life.
The Innocents includes commentary and case narratives by Neufeld and Scheck, as well as
resource information. The images and voices proclaim an historic turning point in America
- a new civil rights movement for equal justice - and an opportunity to figure out what
went wrong, how to fix it, and how to help these survivors heal.
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In Spite of Innocence: Hugo Adam Bedau, Michael Radelet, et al
 The authors recount the personal stories of more than 400 innocent Americans convicted of capital crimes. Some were actually executed; most suffered years of incarceration, many on death row. A prima facie indictment of capital punishment. (Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
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Into the Belly of the Beast - Letters from Prison: Jack Henry Abbott
 A visionary book in the repertoire of prison literature. This is a 37 year old man's account of 25 years behind bars
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Jerry's Riot: The True Story of Montana's 1959 Prison Disturbance: Kevin S. Giles
This new true crime book examines in revealing detail the explosion that resulted when former Alcatraz Island convict Jerry Myles collided with reform warden Floyd Powell. Jerry's Riot takes the reader inside the prison walls where the riot occurred. The 464-page book contains the only known reconstruction of the riot from beginning to end. The story is built around Myles, the riot's principal ringleader, drawing extensively on federal and state records and the author's interviews with hostages, prisoners and others who were involved.
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Journey of Hope... From Violence to Healing: Bill Pelke
"The savage murder of 78-year-old Bible teacher Ruth Pelke by four
teen-age
girls was the beginning of Bill Pelke's Journey of Hope...From Violence to
Healing. Initially Bill did not object when 15-year old Paula Cooper was
sentenced to death for his grandmother's murder. Through the power of
prayer and transformation, he moved from supporting her death sentence, to
working to have it overturned, to dedicating his life to the abolition of
the death penalty. This is the story of Bill's journey, the obstacles he
overcame, and the amazing, loving, forgiving, committed people he met on
the way."
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This book is published by Xlibris. Click here to order
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Journey Toward Justice: Dennis Fritz
Dennis Fritz was an ordinary middle-aged man leading an ordinary life, when, on May 8, 1987, he was on his way to jail on charges of rape and murder. An overzealous prosecutor bent on winning relied on flimsy circumstantial evidence and Dennis was convicted and sentenced to life in prison while his co-defendant, Ronnie Williamson was sentenced to death. After twelve years of incarceration, with the help of Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project, and DNA testing, Dennis and Ronnie were exonerated and the real killer is found guilty. On April 15, 1999, Dennis and Ronnie walk free from prison.
"The story of the unwarranted prosecution and wrongful conviction of Dennis Fritz is compelling and fascinating. After serving eleven years for a murder he did not commit, Dennis was exonerated and had the strength and courage to put his life back together." —John Grisham
"As I write these words, there have been one hundred eighty-one post-conviction DNA exonerations in America. The exonerated, many crime victims and their families (including the Carter family from the Fri and Williamson case) are the heart and soul of this movement. In this unique and brave community of survivors, there is no more decent and dignified a man, nor a more gentle soul, than Dennis Fritz. For eight years he has unstintingly supported our work in every way possible, re-living what are often very painful memories in service to a just cause. And now he has had the fortitude to tell his whole story. As always, I am in awe of his courage and humbled by his efforts." —Barry C. Scheck Co-Director The Innocence Project
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Jurors' Stories of Death - How America's Death Penalty Invests in Inequality (Law, Meaning, and Violence): Bill Kurtis
Jurors' Stories of Death is more than just another book on the death penalty; it is the first systematic survey of how death penalty decisions are made.
Benjamin Fleury-Steiner draws on real-life accounts of white and black jurors in capital punishment trials to discuss the effect of race on the sentencing process. He finds that race is invariably a factor in sentencing, with jurors relying on accounts that deny the often marginalized defendants their individuality and complexity, while reinforcing the jurors' own identities as superior, moral, and law-abiding citizens -- a system that punishes in the name of dominance. This biased story of "us versus them" continues to infuse political rhetoric on crime and punishment in the United States even today.
Jurors' Stories of Death concludes with an original argument for abolition of the death penalty: If America values multiculturalism and cultural diversity, it must do away with institutions such as state-sanctioned capital punishment in order to begin to free itself from the racism and classicism that so insidiously plague social relations today.
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Justice Betrayed: A Double Killing in Old Santa Fe: Ralph Melnick
Angelina Jaramillo, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a prominent New Mexico family, was raped, bludgeoned, and stabbed to
death in her bedroom on November 16, 1931. Thomas Johnson, an African American laborer
with a prison record in four states was convicted of the crime and executed.
Now more than seventy years later this meticulously researched account of the
case substantiates a longstanding rumor that the wrong man was put to death.
This lively true crime story is thought provoking and even more shocking today than at the time of the miscarriage of justice.
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Justice Denied: Clemency Appeals in Death Penalty Cases: Cathleen Burnett
Focusing on executive clemency petitions, the final hope for death row inmates, Cathleen Burnett exposes troubling
flaws in the legal process of administering the death penalty. Her in-depth examination of all of the fifty petitions
presented to the governors of Missouri since the state reinstated capital punishment in 1977, shows in dramatic detail
how the machinery of justice often fails the condemned and their victims alike. Skillfully interweaving her investigation
with compelling case studies, Burnett considers particular stages in death penalty convictions to illuminate the mistakes
and miscarriages of justice commonly addressed in clemency petitions-police misconduct and false testimony; overzealous prosecution;
ineffective defense counsel; judicial prejudice; and state and federal appellate reviews that increasingly neglect the protection of individual rights.
Burnett also probes the decision-making process in evaluating clemency petitions, showing how political and other persuasive forces, from the media to the Pope,
limit a governor's ability to act as a reliable fail-safe to capital punishment.
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Just Revenge: Cost and Consequences of the Death Penalty:: Mark Costanzo
 There are more prisoners on death row than ever in U.S. history. Social psychologist Mark Costanzo's intelligent, provocative, and historically grounded study of the death penalty in America takes an unblinking look at how the system really works--not just how it's supposed to work. Weighing the costs and benefits, Costanzo builds an important new model for understanding the politics behind the practice of capital punishment.
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Kansas Charley: The Story of a Nineteenth Century Boy Murderer: Prof. Joan Jacobs Brumberg
Most Americans regard "kids who kill" as a problem unique to our era. But in historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg's important new work, Kansas Charley, she reminds us that it is, tragically, a long-standing dilemma.
Through the moving tale of Charles Miller, Brumberg takes us into a world of poverty, tragedy, and abuse, of people and places that shaped Miller's behavior, his crime, and his punishment. Orphaned at the age of six, Charles Miller failed to find a safe home, and, at the age of fourteen, was riding the rails under the self-styled moniker "Kansas Charley." Then, on a September evening in 1890, when he was only fifteen, Miller shot and killed two other young men in a boxcar headed for Wyoming. Guilt ridden, Miller gave himself up. His trial lasted just three days, ending in a death sentence that resulted in his controversial 1892 hanging. Some Americans thought the boy's execution was barbaric while others hailed it as an act of justice. Brumberg tells Miller's story with clarity and compassion, suggesting that then, as now, the decision to execute was politically motivated.
Kansas Charley brings vividly to life a thought-provoking chapter in the history of American juvenile justice. It also sheds light on our contemporary predicament, encouraging us to think about what it means for the United States to continue to uphold the juvenile death penalty in the twenty-first century.
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Killing Time: An Investigation Into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal: Dave Lindorff
In the first independent book on the case, which arrives at conclusions not by conviction but by reportage, investigative reporter Dave Lindorff offers explosive new evidence about the prosecution, the defense and Mumia Abu-Jamal. Consider the evidence being kept hidden from the public--by both the defense and the prosecution. New evidence to show presiding Judge Sabo had made up his mind about the case—and the punishment—before the trial’s end. The extent of police corruption—not just in Philadelphia, but of a third of those working directly on the case. The disastrous missteps of Abu-Jamal’s appellate lawyers and the secret flaws of his new defense team. The struggle over Abu-Jamal’s new line of defense arguing that a hit man may have been involved. New evidence about the "blurted out" confession Abu-Jamal is alleged to have uttered. What Judge Yohn, who set aside the death sentence, missed entirely. And the missing evidence that reveals the presence of another participant at the shooting scene. This is a compelling page-turner by an investigator who never stops digging. Wherever you started on this famous case, Lindorff will leave you with an entirely new perspective.
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The Last Face You'll Ever See: The Private Life of the American Death Penalty: Ivan Solotaroff
In fascinating detail Ivan Solotaroff introduces us to men who carry out executions and their experience doing it. Although the emphasis is on the personal lives of these men and those that they have put to death, the book also addresses some of the deeper issues of the death penalty and connects the veiled, elusive figure of the executioner to that vast majority of Americans who have claimed to support executions since 1977: Why do we do it? Or more exactly, Why do we want to?
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Last Meal: Jacquelyn C. Black (April 2003)
Jacquelyn C. Black has created a powerful book of more than 60 photographs, focused on death row inmates and what they chose as their last meal before being executed. Combined with last words of the condemned, each left and right set of pages features a photo of the person and what they ate. Focused on inmates in Texas, among the photos and meals is that of Karla Faye Tucker.
Some apologize for their crimes. Others cling to a claim of innocence. Background information such as education level and job at the time of arrest is often included, making the book an eerily disturbing work. Information about the death penalty is sprinkled through the book, from statistics on countries with the highest number of executions (the U.S ranks third, ahead of Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia). The sparse nature of the statistics and text leaves the photos of Last Meal to create a powerful emotional reaction.
Available from Common Courage Press or through links below.
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Law, Psychology, & Death Penalty Litigation: James R. Eisenberg, PhD, ABPP
This book provides a thorough introduction to the role that
forensic psychology plays in capital trials. Acknowledging the
important differences between capital trials and other criminal
trials, psychologists working in this area must be well versed in the
history of the death penalty, the landmark Supreme Court decisions,
and current death penalty law. The author takes a step-by-step
approach in describing the various tasks that might confront the
forensic psychologist in a death penalty trial including issues of
competency to be executed, mental retardation, risk assessment,
and related ethical dilemmas. It is is designed for mental health
professionals new to death penalty litigation as well as upper level
courses in psychology and law, etc.
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Legacy of Violence: Lynch Mobs and Executions in Minnesota: John D.Bessler
In Legacy of Violence, John D. Bessler takes us on a compelling journey
through the history of lynchings and state-sanctioned executions that
dramatically shaped Minnesota's past. Through personal accounts of those
involved with the events, Bessler traces the history of both famous and
lesser-known executions and lynchings in Minnesota, the state's anti-death
penalty and anti-lynching movements, and the role of the media in the
death penalty debate.
This book may be ordered directly from the University of Minnesota Press at www.upress.umn.edu/Books/B/bessler_legacy.html
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Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America's Future: Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., Jesse L. Jackson, Jr., & Bruce Shapiro (2001)
 With public opinion polls showing opposition to the death penalty at its highest level in twenty years, this timely book by two of America's most important civil rights leaders and the Nation's criminal justice reporter makes a passionate and persuasive case against capital punishment. Combining a powerful moral argument with recent, overwhelming evidence of systematic legal error and widespread racial bias in death penalty cases, Legal Lynching directly attacks the basic claims of those—including our new president—who continue to insist on execution as a punitive solution for an increasing number of crimes. With the abolition of the death penalty in South Africa, the United States has become the last industrialized democracy to persist in state-sponsored execution
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A Lesson Before Dying: Ernest J. Gaines
In a small Cajun community in 1940s Louisiana, a young black man is about to go to the electric chair for murder. A white shopkeeper had died during a robbery gone bad; though the young man on trial had not been armed and had not pulled the trigger, in that time and place, there could be no doubt of the verdict or the penalty.
"I was not there, yet I was there. No, I did not go to the trial, I did not hear the verdict, because I knew all the time what it would be..." So begins Grant Wiggins, the narrator of Ernest J. Gaines's powerful exploration of race, injustice, and resistance, A Lesson Before Dying.
Grant, trapped in a career he doesn't enjoy, eaten up by resentment at his station in life, and angered by the injustice he sees all around him, dreams of taking his girlfriend Vivian and leaving Louisiana forever. But when Jefferson is convicted and sentenced to die, his grandmother, Miss Emma, begs Grant for one last favor: to teach her grandson to die like a man.
As Grant struggles to impart a sense of pride to Jefferson before he must face his death, he learns an important lesson as well: heroism is not always expressed through action--sometimes the simple act of resisting the inevitable is enough. Populated by strong, unforgettable characters, Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying offers a lesson for a lifetime.
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Letters From Death Row: Antoaneta Bezlova
Their numbers are taboo. Their stories condemned to oblivion. The world of China's death row prisoners is too forbidding, the execution grounds too sordid to yield a compelling book that would escape the scrutiny of the communist state censors.
But by virtue of its modesty, the recently-published "Letters From The Death Row" succeeds where other more ambitious works would have perhaps failed. It tells the stories of 22 Chinese death row prisoners -- men and women. It relates them straight from their prison cells. The account is gripping because it exudes the rare honesty of condemned people in the last hours before their death.
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Life on Death Row: Robert W Murray
This is an in-depth examination of life on death row. It is drawn from the personal experience of a death row prisoner. It is filled with insightful revelations and delivers an unvarnished perspective on death row and capital punishment. And it challenges the conventional conceptions in a dramatic, unflinching style.
This book is also available from 1st Books Library, Book order hotline at
1-888-280-7715, or on-line at www.1stbooks.com
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Live from Death Row: Mumia Abu Jamal
 Here for the first time are the prison writings of Abu-Jamal--including the censored commentaries from NPR--an unflinching account of the brutalities, humiliations and
atrocities of prison life. Articulate and compelling, the work is certain to fuel the controversy surrounding capital punishment and freedom of speech.
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Living Justice : Love, Freedom, and the Making of The Exonerated: Jessica Blank, Erik Jensen
Capitalizing on a shifting trend in public attitudes about the death penalty in 2000, former actors Blank and Jensen decided to write an ensemble piece using the words of real people to highlight the legal flaws in the death penalty statute. The result was the play The Exonerated, about wrongly convicted men and women on death row throughout America. This passionate book explains how Blank and Jensen researched the work and concurrently tells the story of how their own relationship blossomed in the process. Initially worried about winning the confidence of the freed ex-convicts, Blank, a "pushy East Coaster," and Jensen, a self-absorbed Midwesterner, charmed and cajoled the suspicious and secretive group into revealing how the justice system shortchanged them by lack of hard evidence, legal miscues and racism. The authors illuminate each case and then explain how they assembled their findings into a script. The play's Broadway production, which starred Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Richard Dreyfuss and others, went on to receive critical acclaim; and the work recently appeared on Court TV. This book about its making is a fascinating, revealing memoir by a couple who were able to find meaning in their lives and bring light to a pressing issue in American society
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Living Next Door to the Death House: Living Next Door to the Death House
Huntsville, Texas, has been the site of more executions since 1982 than
any other place in the United States. For Virginia Stem Owens and 4
generations of her family, it's also home.
Stem Owens and her husband, David, explore the history of capital
punishment and of Huntsville's prison system. The result is both
even-handed and chilling. They study the lives of prison officials, public
defenders, parents of criminals, and an executioner.
The authors mix documentary-style interview transcripts with more literary
language ("the gray twill unisex uniforms of prison guards thread like
warp through our town's fabric, holding its economy together and providing
the texture of its identity").
The Owenses do not whitewash brutality, and find that many offenders want
to confess their crimes. They explore the victim-offender mediation
program, which gives perpetrators a chance to acknowledge their guilt and
shame and offers victims' families some sense of resolution. (Stem Owens
covered similar themes in "Watchman on the Walls," CT, May 21, 2001.)
Readers on both sides of the death penalty debate will find Living Next
Door to the Death House a valuable contribution.
(source : Christianity Today)
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Living With the Death Penalty: The Aftermath of Killing and Execution in the United States : Courtney Vaughn
A new book that examines the impact of executions on correctional officers, offenders, chaplains, attorneys, and victims' family members. In this book, author Courtney Vaughn, a rape victim and an Educational Leadership and Policy Studies professor at the University of Oklahoma, offers first-person accounts of what it is like to experience the death penalty from a variety of perspectives. She explores the sacrifice, alienation, and resiliency that are common traits among the various groups impacted by executions, and uses their stories to provide readers with a better understanding of the "circle of violence" associated with the death penalty
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Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis: Christian Parenti (2000)
 While there has been no shortage of books in recent years on the failures of the American criminal justice system, what separates Parenti's from the others are his gripping descriptions of gang sweeps, border raids, and jailhouse violence... His excellent on-the-ground reporting is paired with a radical--but rarely raving--class analysis of the police and prison crisis. (Craig Aaron)
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Lockdown Prison Heart: Renaldo Hudson et. al, Katy Ryan (Editor)
Renaldo Hudson, an inmate at a maximum-security prison outside Chicago, initiated a writing contest in the fall of 2003, asking Illinois prisoners to reflect on the questions, "Who am I, and what can I do to be better?" Lockdown Prison Heart contains the thirty-eight personal essays submitted to that contest. These brief writings--thoughtful, angry, sorrowful, honest, regretful, meditative--allow us to hear directly from people whose voices are too often distorted or ignored by mainstream media.
The proceeds from the collection will be donated to Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation, a national organization composed of people who have had family members murdered--by homicide or state killings--and who work to restore communities by promoting crime prevention, opposing the death penalty, and helping victims reconstruct their lives.
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Lucasville, The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising: Staughton Lynd
In 1993 prisoners took control of the maximum-security prison in Lucasville, Ohio. Their 11-day ordeal started with a dispute between the warden and Muslim prisoners and ended with a negotiated settlement, but only after nine prisoners and one hostage had been killed. In the months that followed, leaders of the uprising were singled out by the state, tried, and sentenced to death despite compelling evidence of their innocence. Lucasville tells the inside story of the uprising, the subsequent trial and sentencing.
Eminent historian and lawyer Staughton Lynd brings the full power of evidence to bear as he retells the Lucasville story. He argues compellingly that the five men sentenced to death have been unfairly convicted. In addition, he describes the uprising from the inside—how the prisoners worked together, black and white, even Muslims and members of the Aryan Brotherhood, for the improvement of conditions.
The ease with which the state has been able to use its resources, and the court's, to bring the Lucasville 5 to the point of execution raises questions that will make readers want to rethink not only the justification for these convictions, but the legitimacy of the death penalty in any case.
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Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race & The Death Penalty in America : Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. & Austin Sarat, ed.
Since 1976, over forty percent of prisoners executed in American jails have been African American or Hispanic. This trend shows little evidence of diminishing, and follows a larger pattern of the violent criminalization of African American populations that has marked the country's history of punishment.
In a bold attempt to tackle the looming question of how and why the connection between race and the death penalty has been so strong throughout American history, Ogletree and Sarat headline an interdisciplinary cast of experts in reflecting on this disturbing issue. Insightful original essays approach the topic from legal, historical, cultural, and social science perspectives to show the ways that the death penalty is racialized, the places in the death penalty process where race makes a difference, and the ways that meanings of race in the United States are constructed in and through our practices of capital punishment.
From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State not only uncovers the ways that race influences capital punishment, but also attempts to situate the linkage between race and the death penalty in the history of this country, in particular the history of lynching. In its probing examination of how and why the connection between race and the death penalty has been so strong throughout American history, this book forces us to consider how the death penalty gives meaning to race as well as why the racialization of the death penalty is uniquely American.
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Machinery of Death: The Reality of America's Death Penalty Regime: David Dow (Editor), Mark Dow (Editor), Christopher Hitchens
Thurgood Marshall said that the more people learned about the death penalty, the more they'd be against it. It's racist, unfair to poor people and the mentally retarded, and far too often ends horribly in the state sanctioned murder of innocents. And no one, no matter how much they're paid, likes to be involved with death itself.
In Machinery of Death, death penalty lawyer David R. Dow and writer Mark Dow bring together diverse views from lawyers, wardens, victims' families, executioners and inmates to show how America's death penalty system actually works, and what it does to those who come in contact with it. Arguing that the more we know about the system the more we'll oppose it, the book offers harrowing story after story of racist juries and unjust rulings, of backward judges and public defenders, and of families facing the ultimate decision. Together, these intimate and shocking writings show that in practice, the death penalty is impossible to administer in a fair, workable manner.
This is the first death penalty book to look beyond innocence and morality, arguing against executing even the guilty people. Machinery of Death is a crucial link in the fiery public debate over the meaning and usefulness of this deeply flawed system.
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The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer : Michael Meltsner
"It was not until I arrived at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund that I learned my profession, how to work with colleagues and clients, and how it might feel to grow up in the law." So begins Michael Meltsner's vivid account of how as a lawyer for Muhammad Ali, for the doctors who ended Jim Crow at American hospitals, and for scores of death row inmates he became such a deeply involved activist in the civil rights movement. Part memoir and part critical study, The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer offers both a personalized history of the civil rights movement from a participant's perspective, and the compelling account of how a lawyer committed to social change discovered himself in his work.
Focused on the inside story of law reform, the book contains portraits of some larger-than-life figures, including Thurgood Marshall, William Kuntsler, and the charismatic black law professor Derrick Bell, as well as of unheralded movers and shakers such as the attorney C. B. King of Albany, Georgia, and Margaret Burnham, who as a young lawyer representing Angela Davis got caught in a racial and generational crossfire. Alongside these recollections, Meltsner provides a critical analysis of early civil rights efforts to achieve social change through litigation while also providing the wider context of the personalities, policies, and tactics that continue to shape reform efforts today.
Deeply researched and using case files that have previously been off-limits to historians, The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer will appeal to young and upcoming lawyers, to students of the history of the 1960s, of civil rights, and of African American studies, and to anyone interested in social change.
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May God Have Mercy: John C. Tucker
 An object lesson in the dangers of the death penalty: the execution of Roger Coleman for a murder almost no one believed he committed.
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Mean Justice: A Town's Terror, A Prosecutor's Power, A Betrayal of Innocence: Edward Humes
 A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist uncovers the poignant story of Patrick Dunn's battle against false evidence and official misconduct in a California town without pity, where a shocking number of innocent people have been wrongly convicted. Dunn was sentenced to life for the murder of the person he loved most in the world.
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Minds on Trial : Great Cases in Law and Psychology: Charles Patrick Ewing, Joseph T. McCann
In recent years, the public has become increasingly fascinated with the criminal mind. Television series centered on courtroom trials, criminal investigations, and forensic psychology are more popular than ever. More and more people are interested in the American system of justice and the
individuals who experience it firsthand.
Minds on Trial: Great Cases in Law and Psychology gives you an inside view of 20 of the highest profile legal cases of the last 50 years. Drs. Ewing and McCann take you "behind the scenes" of each of these cases, some involving celebrities like Woody Allen, Mike Tyson, and Patty Hearst, and explain
the impact they had on the fields of psychology and the law. Many of the cases in this book, whether involving a celebrity client or an ordinary person in an extraordinary circumstance, were determined in part by the expert testimony of a psychologist or other mental health professional.
Psychology has always played a vital role in so many aspects of the American legal system, and these fascinating trials offer insight into many intriguing psychological issues. In addition to expert testimony, some of the issues discussed in this entertaining and educational book include the
insanity defense, brainwashing, criminal profiling, capital punishment, child custody, juvenile delinquency, and false confessions.
In Minds on Trial, the authors skillfully convey the psychological and legal drama of each case, while providing important and fresh professional insights.
Mental health and legal professionals, as well as others with an interest in psychology and the law will have a hard time putting this scholarly, yet readable book down.
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Miracle at Sing Sing: How One Man Transformed the Lives of America's Most Dangerous Prisoners : Ralph Blumenthal
In his 22 years as warden of Sing Sing prison through the 1920s and 1930s Lewis Edward Lawes oversaw the execution of more than 300 inmates. In Blumenthal's beautiful and bracing account of those years, Lawes, a death penalty opponent, experienced the pain of each death as though it were one of his own family. Against convention, Lawes saw his charges as individuals with talents, flaws and the need for fundamental respect. In looking out for his "boys," Lawes fought existing practices, misguided reformers and a public that would sooner forget those who have run afoul of the law than come to grips with the social conditions that produce such people. Blumenthal, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, presents a swirling cavalcade of Runyonesque characters—unrepentant multiple murderers, career armed robbers, fallen society swells and tragic young people whose lives were altered by some impulsive act. He brilliantly captures in them the same spark that drove Lawes's entire career—a basic and irreducible humanity. Always Blumenthal brings the narrative back to the inmates and their trusted overseer. When Lawes retired in 1941, work at Sing Sing stopped and prisoners wept openly. With exquisite detail and real passion, Blumenthal has brought to life a legend and the world he sought to make better. B&w photos.
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Moral Politics / How Liberals and Conservatives Think: George Lakoff
In this classic text, the first full-scale application of cognitive science to politics, George Lakoff analyzes the unconscious and rhetorical worldviews of liberals and conservatives, discovering radically different but remarkably consistent conceptions of morality on both the left and right. For this new edition, Lakoff adds a preface and an afterword extending his observations to major ideological conflicts since the book's original publication, from the impeachment of Bill Clinton to the 2000 presidential election and its aftermath.
Dr. Lakoff also demonstrates how conservatives in the U.S. have mastered
the use of language to frame the national debate to their advantage,
whereas most liberals seem to have no notion of this. While not all
abolitionists consider themselves liberals or progressives, the abolitionist cause would benefit from an examination of this phenomenon. For more
on this--and a two-page sample of Dr. Lakoff's writing--visit "Framing
The Debate" at: www.commondreams.org/views04/0912-20.htm
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A Mothers Torment : Shirley Dicks
Heart-breaking, and at times infuriating, in its depiction of the ruthless machinery of our courts, “A Mother’s Torment” by Shirley Dicks is both a mother’s impassioned plea for a fallen son and a scathing commentary on the terrifying vulnerability that so many people without means in this country suffer while enmeshed in the criminal justice system.
Jeff Dicks, the twenty-two year old son of an impoverished Tennessee mother, was convicted of murder and sentenced to die, despite an overwhelming lack of evidence to support the claim that he did not participate in a store robbery that resulted in the death of the storeowner. His mother Shirley’s desperate fight to exonerate him and her unrelenting crusade against the men, and the system, that she believes unjustly condemned her son, is the basis of “A Mother’s Torment”. The book takes the reader on a journey from Ms. Dick’s poverty-stricken youth and struggles to raise her children to the fateful day that Jeff Dicks was arrested for murder; but it could be, in truth, any mother’s story – and it is this fact that makes Ms. Dick’s account so powerful.
Though the often grinding pace of her narrative might lead an impartial reader to wish for less, Ms. Dick’s drive to save her son can, in the end, only humble even the most rational. Having experienced a lifetime of penury and hardship, Ms. Dicks did not spare her own self from confronting, and breaking, the law in order to keep Jeff alive. Her daily invectives and demands for justice are, at moments, difficult to read—until one remembers that every day, somewhere, someone in the nation rails with equal rage for a loved one to no avail. Ms. Dick’s most gripping legacy in the book indeed arises from the contemplation that while Jeff sat in prison and his trial turned into an unbelievable travesty with only one possible outcome, it is a scenario that has no doubt played countless times throughout the United States, exacting as its toll the anguish of countless mothers and sons like Ms. Dicks and Jeff.
The loss of Ms. Dicks and her family is unimaginable. Yet from the devastation, she has had the courage and strength to pen this tremendously candid and passionate account, in the hope of saving others. Her book is one every parent, and every person working in the criminal justice system, should read—a testament to the unbreakable bonds between a mother and a son, and to the indomitable will of the human spirit.
This book may be ordered directly from www.amotherstorment.com
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Necktie Parties: Legal Executions in Oregon 1851-1905: Diane L. Goeres-Gardner
Diane Goeres-Gardner makes readers eyewitnesses to frontier justice in Necktie Parties. This is the story of the men who climbed the gallows steps and faced the hangman’s noose during the early years of settlement in Oregon.
Today, capital punishment is a controversial topic, in the United States and around the world. That wasn’t the case during the 1800s on America’s western frontier. Executions were public events drawing hundreds—sometimes thousands—of residents from miles around. Parents often brought their children, believing the youngsters should learn what happened to people who choose the wrong paths in life.
The record of Oregon’s hangings during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a history of ordinary people who committed extraordinary acts. In many cases, the condemned enjoyed their notoriety, at least up to the moment the noose was tightened around their necks.
Goeres-Gardner also looks at the backgrounds of the condemned and their victims, the crimes and the investigations. The author uses trial records, witness testimony, newspaper reports and other historical records to bring to life each of the more than fifty cases included in Necktie Parties.
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No Justice: No Victory - The Death Penalty in Texas: Susan Lee Campbell Solar
Susan Lee Campbell Solar began to research the subject shortly after
Governor George W. Bush declared that the death penalty in Texas worked,
that no innocent person had been killed on his watch. She researched the
politics-of-fear tactics that fueled the early campaigns of George W. and
his father, for whom tough-on-crime, victim advocacy and pro-death penalty
rhetoric was a ticket to power.
A native Texan, she looked at the post civil war history of capital
punishment in a state famous for lynching and explored the cultural legacy
and inherent racism therein. She interviewed attorneys, judges and law
professors to develop an understanding of innocence and clemency. She
discovered an appeals process so flawed that Gary Graham, for instance,
traveled through more than twenty court proceedings - and still evidence
from multiple witnesses who said he wasn't the killer was never heard by a
jury. She discovered prosecutorial misconduct, incompetent and untrained
public defenders, geographic disparities in the assignment of capital
murder charges and inadequate funding for investigation.
A crime victim herself, Solar explored the effects of it on families of
offenders and victims. Their stories reveal the human cost of what death
penalty attorney Richard Burr called "this war against our own." They also
point to social remedies for the pandemic violence of our world. Solar
writes about Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation and Journey of Hope.
>
Edited by Susan Bright, Introduction by Steve Hall, StandDown Texas
Available from Plain View Press, ISBN: 1-891386-99-9, $18.95
Tel: 512-441-2452
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Notorious Prisons: Inside the World's Most Feared Institutions: Scott Christianson
NOTORIOUS PRISONS examines in detail each prison, with depictions of original plans; descriptions of the construction, facilities, and policies; and a recounting of what general life for the prisoners was like. The most interesting inmates in each prison are highlighted, describing their crimes, trials, and experiences within the prison. In the Alcatraz section, for instance, are convicts like Robert Stroud, the "birdman," who inspired the Burt Lancaster vehicle. There are bios of the Rosenbergs, and descriptions of what it was like to arrive at Devil's Island.
Here, too, are the details of escapes, like the only near-successful attempt to break out of Alcatraz, perpetrated by the Anglin brothers--a couple of career criminals who dug their way with a spoon through the plaster walls of their cell, then followed a thirty-foot-tall vent to freedom, leaving papier-mâché decoys in their cells.
Then there are the punishments. The guillotine at the Bastille. And the wrangle over the first electric chair, installed at Sing Sing--including a recounting of Thomas Edison's gruesome campaign, waged at the expense of test cats, to convince the public that AC was more deadly than DC. Prisons exist at the strange intersection of cruelty and civil society, and no book has ever detailed the odd excesses of this union as well as NOTORIOUS PRISONS
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La peine de mort aux Etats-Unis: Andre Kaspi
Professor at the University of Paris I, Andre Kaspi has long set himself
the goal of explaining America to the French... not without a few passing
moments of discouragement. "Sometimes you say to yourself, what good am
I?" he recently confessed.
Here he attacks one of the thorniest subjects in Franco-American relations
by bravely calling for "an effort at understanding." "I am always asked:
when are they going to abolish it?" he says. "But, to abolish it, it is
necessary first of all to understand the system!"
Good luck, Mister Kaspi. For even when one has read in this solid and
perfectly documented book that the Federal State is not all powerful in
penal matters, that there exists a whole arsenal of appeal procedures at
the disposal of those sentenced to death, and that many of them will never
be executed, all it takes is an incident like the one which occurred in
Ohio 10 days ago, where it took 6 prison guards to control a recalcitrant
condemned man and force him to lie down on the execution table, for any
effort at rational explanation of the sociopolitical context of the death
penalty to be swept away by the barbarity of the punishment.
Andre Kaspi is much more convincing when he describes the vigor of the
debate in the United States around capital punishment and the flaws in its
application. Noting that the ideological debate leads to a dead end, he
states on the other hand that pragmatism is opening new ways. The judicial
errors brought to light thanks to the increased use of genetic analysis,
have, for example, placed the partisans of the death penalty on the
defensive.
Even if abolition is not for tomorrow, the fact that the number of death
sentences has dropped by almost 50% in 5 years is doubtless alone a sign
that this debate is not fruitless.
(source: Le Monde)
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Poetic Justice: Reflections on the Big House, the Death House, and the American Way of Justice: Robert Johnson
A splendid collection of poetry dealing with the reality of the American criminal justice system. This publication is currently being used as a supplementary text in at least one University. This book of poetry allows us to look, with a different view, at the realities of the big house, the death house, and the prison. Poetic Justice should be read by all since we are all affected by the justice system in one way or another. Also available CD with the author reading the poems.
Order from www.americanletters.org/catalogu.htm
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A Prisoner's Cookbook: Helen M. Copeland, Editor
Prisoners from all across the nation submitted the contents of "A
PRISONER'S COOKBOOK". It has more than 100 tasty, easily fixed recipes.
Recipes that can be fixed by anyone, anywhere, you don't have to be a convict
to enjoy these recipes.
There are also some funny stories, jokes, cartoons
and a short glossary of prison slang words and phrases.
The book is softcover and staple-bound.
Order from: Bluehorn Publishing, P.O. Box 2364, Humble TX 77347
Cost is $10.00 + $1.00 s & h = $11.00 Check or Money Order ONLY
If you need an order form send a SASE to the above address.
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Prison Madness: The Mental Health Crisis behind Bars and What We Must Do about It: Terry Allen Kupers and Hans Toch
Kupers, a forensic psychiatrist and psychology professor at the Wright Institute, has been an active observer at county jails for 25 years and has served as an expert witness in court cases involving treatment of prisoners. Here he delivers a powerful and constructive criticism of the attitudes prison professionals hold toward inmates and the way inmates are physically handled, especially the mentally disturbed but also women and racial minorites. He focuses on abysmal physical conditions, unsanitary and often physically threatening overcrowding, the traumatization and debasement of prisoners, worker burn-out, and woefully inadequate inpatient, psychiatric, or counseling services, contributing to increasing individual dysfunction and financed by taxpayers. Kupers concludes his cogent presentation by suggesting strategies for a quantum shift in mindset (madness no longer seen as badness) to realize a climate of, at least, support for the basic constitutional and human rights of prisoners. Highly recommended for academics and professionals (Library Journal)
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Are Prisons Obsolete?: Angela Davis
"In this brilliant, thoroughly researched book, Angela Davis swings a wrecking ball into the racist and sexist underpinnings of the American prison system. Her arguments are well wrought and restrained, leveling an unflinching critique of how and why more than 2 million Americans are presently behind bars, and the corporations who profit from their suffering. Davis explores the biases that criminalize communities of color, politically disenfranchising huge chunks of minority voters in the process. Uncompromising in her vision, Davis calls not merely for prison reform, but for nothing short of 'new terrains of justice.' Another invaluable work in the Open Media Series by one of America's last truly fearless public intellectuals." Cynthia McKinney, former Congresswoman from Georgia
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Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance: Leonard Peltier, Harvey Arden (Editor), Ramsey Clark (Preface)
 A classic of prison literature… It is also a cry for help, an accusation against monstrous injustice, a beautiful expression of man's soul, demanding release. (Howard Zinn)
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A Promise of Justice: The Eighteen Year Old Fight to Save Four Innocent Men: Rob Warden and David L. Protess (1998)
On May 11, 1978, Carol Schmal was brutally raped and murdered along with her
fiancé, Larry Lionberg, in East Chicago Heights. Four young black men were arrested, tried, and convicted despite questionable evidence and strong alibis. Two were sentenced to death, one received life without parole, and the other a 75-year sentence. In 1982 they were able to get a new trial on the grounds of ineffective counsel but were again convicted, this time by perjured testimony. These details came to the attention of Warden (Gone in the Night,
L J 5/1/93) in 1982 while he was investigating the case for the Chicago Lawyer, but he could persuade no one that the convicted men were innocent. In 1995, he was joined by Protess (journalism, Northwestern Univ.). Along with three students and a crack team of volunteer lawyers, they were able to prove the young men innocent and even to locate the real killers. A classic case of rush to judgment and investigative journalism at its best. (Library Journal)
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Prophets Without Honor: A Requiem for Moral Patriotism: William Strabala, Michael Palecek
The book tells the story of a group of American men who happen to be
priests who happen to have served decades in American prisons and the
stalwart women who helped them form an international movement called
Plowshares. In so doing, the book tells the morally patriotic story of
America, a story told before only from behind an open hand across the
face, like a football coach talking to his spotters in full view of a
national television audience, afraid someone might see.
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The Prosecutors -- A Year in the Life of a District Attorney's Office: By Gary Delsohn
The American justice system is designed to err on the side of allowing the
guilty to go free rather than incarcerate the innocent. But when an
innocent defendant enters the criminal justice system, grievous mistakes
can occur, even when prosecutors play by the rules. Case studies suggest
that at least occasionally, the prosecutor could not have foreseen the
grievous mistake.
Gary Delsohn, a Sacramento Bee reporter, reaches that conclusion in his
first book, "The Prosecutors." Delsohn obtained special access to the
Sacramento district attorney's office for an entire year. His time spent
there led to interesting insights, some supportive of the conventional
wisdom about the American justice system, others counterintuitive.
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Protest in the Land of Plenty: Center Lane Press
A new photojournalism book featuring 222 often dramatic and compelling photographs of protests and demonstrations during the years 1997-2001, includes photographs of the protest that took place outside the Huntsville, Texas, prison on the day that Gary Graham was executed.
Those who support CUADP and purchase the book online will have twenty-five percent of the book's retail price donated to the CUADP.
To take advantage of this offer, go to www.centerlanepress.com, and after filling out the online order form enter CUADP in the field that asks, " How did you hear about us"
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Proximity to Death: William S. McFeely
 McFeely, emeritus professor of Humanities at the University of Georgia and Pulitzer Prize-winning author begins his anti-death penalty argument with the occasion on which he became an expert witness in a rural Georgia sentencing hearing of a convicted murderer. Evolving into a larger story about other courtrooms in which
defense lawyers not only defend their clients but decry the death penalty, McFeely's discussion includes obstacles faced by a group of Atlanta lawyers when attempting to prevent and reverse death sentences of prisoners, whose cases he painstakingly documents. (Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
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Punishment in Search of a Crime: Ian Gray (1989)
As polls report that a majority of Americans favor capital punishment, Gray and Stanley, in cooperation with Amnesty International U.S.A., marshal opposing arguments. The editors, screenwriters who claim to have approached the issue with neutrality, were convinced by their research that ``violent solutions merely produce more violence.'' The 42 interviews here--with lawyers, clergy, prison personnel, inmates on death row and families of murder victims, among others--offer persuasive testimony. Keeping vigil with a mentally deficient young man the night before his execution is compared to a ``campfire, and the conversation to throwing logs on the fire to keep away the darkness and terror.'' Willie Darden is heard protesting his conviction on the way to Florida's electric chair in 1988. The history of the death penalty, economic and sociological factors concerning its application, as well as its dubious efficacy as a deterrent do not, however, receive adequate attention in this format. Publishers' Weekly
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The Race to Incarcerate: Marc Mauer
The use of incarceration in the United States has increased five-fold since 1973. Twenty-nine percent of black males born today can expect to be imprisoned in their lifetime. Race to Incarcerate tells the chilling story of this unprecedented explosion in the prison population, demonstrating how the dramatic expansion of prisons and jails has failed to have any substantial impact on crime. Exploring the intersection of race and class that underpins current politics and crime policy. Race to Incarcerate traces the political history of these developments and shows how, ultimately, we still blame and punish the least fortunate for America's social problems.
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Reflective Glass: Gene Hathorn (currently on death row in Texas)
The book is a collection of 15 essays that deal with life on Texas Death Row. Gene is a 21-year veteran and has
intimate knowledge of the heartbreaking reality of life on the "Row" about which he has written eloquently
throughout his stay. His essays deal with many aspects of death row life, the agony of losing friends
through execution, the medical neglect of prisoners that he has witnessed and experienced, and the
sometimes cruel behavior of the guards. Gene is an accomplished author; his essays have been published
in the prison newspaper, the collection "Frontiers of Justice," and several have won recognition from the
PEN Prisoner Writing Contest for Prisoners. He has previously published the book "Self Land: A Death Odyssey,"
and was a contributor to the poetry anthology "Trapped Under Ice."
Reflective Glass is a
paperback, 179 pages in length, and cost $10 plus postage ($1.50 inside USA, $5.00 for Europe).
It can be ordered from Maria Augusteijn, P.O. Box 7982, Colorado Springs, CO 80933-7982, USA.
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Religion and the Death Penalty: A Call for Reckoning: Erik C. Owens John D. Carlson & Eric P. Elshtain (editors)
This important book is
sure to foster informed public discussion about the death penalty
by deepening readers' understanding of how religious beliefs and
perspectives shape this contentious issue. Featuring a fair, balanced
appraisal of its topic, Religion and the Death Penalty brings
thoughtful religious reflection to bear on current challenges facing
the capital justice system.
One look at the list of contributors reveals the significance of
this book. Here are recognized leaders from the academy,
government, and public life who also represent a wide range of
faith commitments, including Jewish, Christian, and Muslim. Like
many people of faith and goodwill, the authors disagree with
one another, variously supporting retention, reform, or abolition
of capital punishment. As a result, the book presents the most
comprehensive and well-rounded religiously oriented discussion
of the death penalty available.
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Resistance, Rebellion and Death : Albert Camus
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death displays Camus's rigorous moral intelligence addressing issues that range from colonial warfare in Algeria to the social cancer of capital punishment. But this stirring book is above all a reflection on the problem of freedom, and, as such, belongs in the same tradition as the works that gave Camus his reputation as the conscience of our century: The Stranger, The Rebel, and The Myth of Sisyphus
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Reversible Errors: Scott Turow
Turow takes on the death-penalty controversy in his latest legal thriller and places complex characters on both sides of the issue, battling over a thorny, convoluted case. In 1991, three people were brutally murdered in a Kindle County diner.
Prosecutor Muriel Wynn and detective Larry Starczek ferreted out Rommy Gandolf, who soon confessed to the crime. Ten years later, Rommy is on death row, just weeks away from his execution.
Arthur Raven has been appointed as his lawyer, but he can't imagine that anything new will turn up despite Rommy's claims of innocence. Then Erno Erdai steps forward. Serving a 10-year sentence for assault and dying of cancer, Erno claims that he, not Rommy, committed the murders in the diner.
Arthur is skeptical at first, but he wants to believe in his client, so soon he is pushing the case forward with all his might. Muriel and Larry are incensed, certain that, despite Erno's claims, Rommy is guilty. Gillian Sullivan, the judge who heard Rommy's case and sentenced him, is reluctantly drawn back into the legal wrangling.
Turow does an excellent job of balancing the twists and turns of the case with his characters' equally complicated personal lives and relationships, making for a well-rounded, exciting, introspective thriller.
Click here for a New York Times review of the book and background on Scott Turow.
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Ring of Truth : Nancy Pickard
The shocking murder case splashed across the Florida headlines has all the right elements for true-crime writer Marie Lightfoot's next bestseller. A charming minister's love affair with a beautiful, wealthy new church member ends in the murder of his wife. The accused now sits on death row, while his lover walks free. Justice appears to have been served, but Marie senses there is more to the story. From the day two little girls found the dead woman in an abandoned mansion to an unexpected visitor's shattering confession, the case's disturbing twists teach Marie a bone-chilling lesson: underestimating the criminal mind can be deadly.
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Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600-1987: Richard J. Evans
The state has no greater power over its own citizens than that of killing them. This book examines the use of that supreme sanction in Germany, from the seventeenth century to the present.
This remarkable and startling book casts new light on the history of German attitudes to law, deviance, cruelty, suffering and death, illuminating many aspects of Germany's modern political development. Rituals of Retribution tells the stories of the men and women who went to the block; the politicians, philosophers, and officials who debated whether they should be sent there; and the executioners whose job it was to kill them.
Using sources ranging from folksongs and ballads to the newly released government papers from the former German Democratic Republic, eminent historian Richard Evans scrutinizes the ideologies behind capital punishment and comments on interpretations of the history of punishment offered by writers such as Foucault and Elias. He has made a formidable contribution not only to scholarship on German history but also to the social theory of punishment, and to the current debate on the death penalty.
Published in German in 2001
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The Rope, The Chair and The Needle - Capital Punishment in Texas, 1923-1990 : James Marquardt
The authors use "arrest records, prison records, trial transcripts, news reports, inmate files, personal letters, and interviews to examine . . . the social contexts of lynchings, electrocutions, and lethal injections {in Texas}. . . . The work contains comparisons of capital punishment with life imprisonment cases; of those given commutations with those that were not; of sentencing outcomes according to offender characteristics, victim characteristics, and the mixture of the two (i.e., interracial and
interracial crimes)." (Choice) Bibliography. Index.
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Self-Land: A Death Row Odyssey: Gene Hathorn (currently on death row in Texas)
Gene Hathorn wrote a great piece here, that we have to read to understand what death row is in the USA. This man has a great view of this situation, he lives there. He is a great writer, and everyone should read this, to have both sides of the story about death row inmates and the death penalty. Reader's review
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Shall Suffer Death: Alan (AJ) Bannister
 Shall Suffer Death by A.J. Bannister is a book I highly recommend. Bannister's case is examined in detail, his life in prison, and the realities of a death sentence upon the mental and emotional makeup of the condemned, their family and friends is explored. It is a touching book--a book which if read with an open heart and mind--can bring a reader to the realization of the humanity of all. Reader's review
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Shot In The Heart: Mikal Gilmore
 "This is a murder story told from inside the house where murder is born." So writes Mikal Gilmore in this powerfully honest book about the circumstances and upbringing that made the murderous psych pathology of his brother Gary almost a fait accompli. The miracle, one feels after reading this book, is that Mikal was able to resist the same path. (Reader's Catalog)
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Stone Justice, a true story of the life, crime, trials and execution of 26 year old Toni Jo Henry: Debi McMartin and Evelyn Morgan (WA Lawrence King)
Toni Jo Henry was the
only woman ever executed in the electric chair in Louisiana, and the last
woman to be executed in that state. This book highlights the absurd excuse for a trial she
endured, and the barbaric way she was used as a pawn to further the
political aspirations of the DA and judges.
Even though the she was executed in 1942, much of what occurred in her
trial still continues today, with politicians pandering to public fears
by carrying the banner of the death penalty.
This book may be ordered from: www.1stbooks.com
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Stupid White Men ...and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation!: Michael Moore (February 2002)
 "This book has several very strong pages of rant AGAINST the death
penalty, so it should please us all that it is currently the #1 ranked book
at Amazon.com! But perhaps more importantly, Michael Moore has put out the
word that he's distributing the royalties to groups that are "working hard
in our community to shake things up and/or help those who are struggling to
survive." Abe Bonowitz
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Tailspin: The Strange Case of Major Call: Bernard F. Conners
A suspenseful true crime narrative about decorated Air Force Major James Arlon Call and his descent into a life of crime and murder.
The book contains stunning revelations regarding Major Call's role as the killer of Marilyn Sheppard in the infamous Sam Sheppard "Fugitive"
murder case and has received glowing endorsements from some of the top law enforcement and literary figures in America.
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Tainting Evidence - Behind the Scandals at the FBI Crime Lab: John F. Kelly and Phillip K. Wearne
 This provocative, headline-grabbing expose sheds disturbing light on the massive shortcomings of the FBI crime lab -- sure to open the eyes of the public and cause great controversy
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Tears From Heaven; Voices From Hell: Diane P Robertson (Mar-2002)
This book exposes the pros and cons of the death penalty as seen through the eyes of the victims
of violent crime and death row inmates throughout America. Packed with statistics, letters,
essays, anecdotes, and articles from those who have experienced the pain of both sides of the
capital punishment issue.
This book is also available from www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/
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They're Going to Kill My Son: Shirley Dicks, Joan S. Dunphy (Editor)
The sheer weight of reasonable doubt in this case makes one wonder at the trial and appeals
process in death penalty cases where the accused lack the financial resources
for competent legal representation. Jeff Dicks is down to his last appeal.
This book, written by his mother, shockingly brings home the best argument
against capital punishment--that even after a ``fair'' trial an innocent person
might be put to death. (Library Journal)
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Too Much Time, Women in Prison: Jane Evelyn Atwood (2000)
 This is a documentary survey of the experience of women in prison by the award-winning photojournalist Jane Evelyn Atwood. Since 1980 the numbers of women in US prisons have increased tenfold. Similar statistics apply to the nine other countries around the world where Atwood has succeeded in penetrating the prison systems - photographing, interviewing women prisoners and their guards, gathering testimony. The result is a raw and moving account in words and pictures of society's attitude to the issues of women, crime and incarceration. The book raises questions about the relative treatment of men and women in prison and about the links between women's crimes and male violence.
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The Trial of Bat Shea: Jack Casey (June 1994)
A fact-based novel, the compelling tale of pistol politics and ethnic
chicanery in hardscrabble 19th century Troy.
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Triple Jeopardy, A Story of Law at its Best-and Worst:: Roger Parloff (1996)
 The author of Desperate Justice, Speight bases his new novel on a provocative situation, but it is weakened by overwriting and much burdensome psychological observations of the characters. Judge Cullen Whitehurst is an alcoholic whose wife and friends had helped him to recover years earlier, in time to save his legal career. Now, worrying about his impatience and erratic bursts, people close to the judge suspect he's drinking again. He is: secretly and heavily. One night, driving home on icy roads, Whitehurst hits a young man. He moves the body into the middle of the road, where it will be hit again, and drives away, but not before he notes the license number of the next car to roll over the victim. Then he calls the police anonymously. Later, Baxter Post, the son of a prominent family, is on trial in Whitehurst's courtroom, an irony that tests what's left of the judge's conscience. The intended surprise in the denouement misfires, mostly because previous incidents are so confusing that one can't be sure of their import. Publishers' Weekly
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Truth Be Told : Life Lessons From Death Row : Correspondence of Agnes Vadas and Richard Nields
Nobody knows how long it will be before Rich is
executed – if he is executed. For this, too, is
a bewilderment. How he went from being assured
by his attorney of manslaughter charges to being
on death row is a story that comes to light in
the letters, as do the details of a justice
system that, once unjustly underway, cannot
easily be restored. In November, 2004, when Agi
and I sat in the office of Rich's public
defender, he told us, "Rich does not belong on
death row. And I have very little hope that he
will not be executed." He said that publishing
the letters might help Rich's cause.
As this book goes to press, Agi and Rich have
six years of letters between them and no idea of
how much time is left. By sharing their letters,
they share their hope, most of all, for a future
in which the death penalty will no longer exist.
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The Truth Shall Set Him Free: James A Duckett
Having proclaimed since May 1987 that I had nothing to do with this crime, finally one person heard my cries.... Ms Jeanne Bragg investigated the trial records and came to the conclusion that I was INNOCENT! A true story of a murder, lies and a police officers conviction of convenience
This book may be purchased from:
Ms Jeanne Bragg P.O. Box 192 Sorrento FL 32776 USA
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Tunnel Vision: Trial and Error: Robert O. Marshall (2001)
In this 220-page book Marshall, the longest serving inmate on New
Jersey's death row, writes about life behind bars, capital punishment, and his claim that he was wrongly convicted of arranging the shooting death of his wife in 1984.
As well as being available from Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble, this book may also be purchased from New York City-based Algora
Publishing. ($18.95 paperback, $25.95 hardcover).
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Ultimate Punishment : A Lawyer's Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty: Scott Turow
"In that rarest of achievements, a page-turner filled with genuine wisdom, Scott Turow takes us with him on a mesmerizing voyage through the land of murder that he has sadly learned to navigate with skill and compassion, allowing us to hear the stories and feel the grief of the survivors who loved and will never see again those whose lives were stolen in acts of ultimate evil, enabling us to share the experiences of accuser and accused alike as they feel their separate ways through the corridors and courtrooms that constitute the elaborate machinery of death, holding us spellbound as we arrive finally at the secret lying at the heart of every one of Turow’s gripping novels, a secret whose revelation exposes what we truly seek from capital punishment—and why we will never find it there. Written with a fine lawyer’s feel for fairness and with a superb novelist’s gift for telling us truths beyond the power of law’s logic to express, Ultimate Punishment is the ultimate statement about the death penalty: to read it is to understand why law alone cannot make us whole."
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The Unforgiven: Utah's Executed Men: L. Kay Gillespie
Dr. Gillespie has captured and brought to us a rare insiders view of death row. Those not particularly intested in this subject will find themselves quickly reading the book. It's not a difficult read and you might learn something while you're at it! Reader's review
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Victims of Crime and Punishment: Interviews with Victims, Convicts, Their Families, and Support Groups: Shirley Dicks
This thought provoking collection of interviews provides an insight into the multi-faceted issues of victims. Topics include personal accounts from victims as well as voices for reform. Also discussed are organizations who provide assistance to victims.
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Victims of Justice: Thomas Frisbie Randy Garrett (1998)
The Jeanine Nicario murder case refused to fade away. In 1983, her kidnapping and brutal murder erupted into public outrage with citizens demanding justice—but authorities couldn't catch the killer. Nearly a year later, as Election Day loomed, the investigators, pressured by local politicians, mishandled and misrepresented forensic evidence to make an arrest at last—only they had the wrong men. The trial, two subsequent appeals and two retrials evolved into a savage war between prosecutors and attorneys, with the courts hounded by critics who strongly believe that two men had been railroaded and sent to Death Row while a vicious murderer remained unpunished for the crime. This riveting, disturbing account shows how an alliance of ambitious men presented a case that distorted the truth, and, when faced with exposure after obtaining confession of the real killer, covered up their mistakes (the Publisher)
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Waiting to Die - Life on Death Row: Richard M. Rossi
Written by an inmate condemned to Arizona's death row, this unique work describes in powerful detail the challenging realities for prisoners sentenced to die for their crimes. Through a disturbing narrative and rare glimpses into execution regulations, including prison forms and documents, this account reveals the core issues of one of the most controversial and enduring social issues in America today. Examining the rules that govern every aspect of death row inmates' life, this volume describes a world of horrendous medical neglect, dangerous and taxing work on chain gangs, inadequate food, and unrelenting psychological abuse by the prison authorities. A precise and sinister tale, it explores the world of more than 3,500 condemned men and women who will die through lethal injection or a gas chamber.
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Warden: Texas Prison Life and Death From the Inside Out: Jim Willett, Ron Rozelle
This book is non-fiction but is written in the style of a novel from a
first-person perspective.
It begins with Jim Willett's 1st day of work at the Huntsville "Walls"
Unit, and runs through the gamut of his positions during his 30-year
career with Texas Department of Criminal Jutice.
Willett has been witness to a staggering number of executions (89),
several of which he recounts in the book, as well as being present for the
Carrasco siege, the longest-lasting prison standoff in America's history.
Despite the magnitude of these other events which have dominated Willett's
career, he feels it is the smaller, less-noticed parts of his career he
sees as giving the book its unique flavor.
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Warrior Within: Inside Report on Texas Death Row: Charles D. Flores
This is a vivid first-hand account of "doing time" inside the Texas Death Machine:
Can you imagine years with no human contact?
Ever wonder about the mental games of sadists?
Can you guess how they treat unsuccessful suicides?
What's the secret to sanity in maximum security?
Could you learn optimism from the condemned?
Read more about the book, including purchasing instructions at http://warriorwithin.info
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Welfare State, Right to Life and Capital Punishment in India: Parul Sharma
The purpose of this book is to analyse the socio-legal framework in
India, where a welfare state, right to life and the capital punishment
operate side by side. The inter linkages and contradictions dealt with
are relevant to societies with complicated and vast social structures
such as India's. The understanding of the welfare component in difficult
criminal cases must be understood as a real balanced judicial
responsibility. This book introduces various levels of support to the
legal notion of right to life, where jurisprudence, constitutional law
and criminal law are inextricably linked while determining the supremacy
of right to life. The role of psychologists and forensic psychology, have
also been given an equally important position as law, to trace the
legitimacy of the capital punishment in developing countries. The
non-application of the aforesaid discipline may result in devastating
consequences where the criminal and not the crime is eliminated.
Furthermore, the book introduces the importance of constructional
strategies based on a state responsibility, and an interdisciplinary
approach towards crime and punishment. The core question is: what is the
most proper alternative to the capital punishment suitable to the Indian
legal context?
The author explains what problems the socio-legal limits gives rise
to, what conflicts of interest lie behind the problems, and how different
solutions are advantageous or disadvantageous for the different parties
involved. A great deal of interest is devoted to interpretation of the
state and its judicial welfare responsibilities, the right to life in a
justice system, the rarest of rare cases and the rule of law.
Furthermore, the author has reviewed several modern cases from the 1990's
where Indian courts have applied the capital punishment. This is not only
an interesting book; it is an important book. Read it!
This book is available from the publishers Sampark Publications
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Wilkie Collins's The Dead Alive : The Novel, the Case, and Wrongful Convictions : Scott Turow (Foreword), Wilkie Collins, Rob Warden (Editor)
On the evidence of The Dead Alive, Scott Turow writes in his foreword that Wilkie Collins might well be the first author of a legal thriller. Here is the lawyer out of sorts with his profession; the legal process gone awry; even a touch of romance to soften the rigors of the law. And here, too, recast as fiction, is the United States' first documented wrongful conviction case. Side by side with the novel, this book presents the real-life legal thriller Collins used as his model-the story of two brothers, Jesse and Stephen Boorn, sentenced to death in Vermont in 1819 for the murder of their brother-in-law, and belatedly exonerated when their "victim" showed up alive and well in New Jersey in 1820.
Rob Warden, one of the nation's most eloquent and effective advocates for the wrongly convicted, reconsiders the facts of the Boorn case for what they can tell us about the systemic flaws that produced this first known miscarriage of justice-flaws that continue to riddle our system of justice today. A tale of false confessions and jailhouse snitches, of evidence overlooked, and justice more blinkered than blind, the Boorns' story reminds us of the perennial nature of the errors at the heart of American jurisprudence-and of the need to question and correct a system that regularly condemns the innocent.
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Within These Walls : Memoirs of a Death House Chaplain: by Carroll Pickett, Carlton Stowers (Contributor), (May 2002)
Within These Walls is the powerful memoir of Rev. Pickett, who spent fifteen years as the death house chaplain at "The Walls," the Huntsville unit of the Texas prison system. In that capacity Rev. Pickett ministered to 95 men before they were put to death by lethal injection. They came with sinister nicknames like "The Candy Man" and "The Good Samaritan Killer," some contrite, some angry-a few who might even have been innocent. All of them found in Rev. Pickett their last chance for an unbiased confessor who would look at them only as fellow humans, not simply as the convicted criminals the rest of society had already dismissed them as. This first-hand experience gave Rev. Pickett the unique insight needed to write an impassioned statement on the realities of capital punishment in America. The result is a thought-provoking and compelling book that takes the reader inside the criminal mind, inside the execution chamber, and inside the heart of a remarkable man who shares his thoughts and observations not only about capital punishment, but about the dark world of prison society.
"A must-read for anyone interested in getting past the generalities of capital punishment as an 'issue.' ...cogent and unflinching..."
(Ivan Solotaroff, author of The Last Face You'll Ever See)
"A profound, moving and fascinating book...shines a poignant light on the final hours in the lives of the condemned."
(Dave Isay NPR Producer, MacArthur Fellow, and Peabody Award Recipient)
"A heartbreaking account...a dramatic story that is also a poignant--and compelling--brief against the death penalty."
(Stephen G. Michaud, author of Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer)
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Who Owns Death? Capital Punishment, The American Conscience and the End of
the Death Penalty: Dr. Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell (2000)
It is a remarkable testimony to the authors' skills and the clarity of their writing that . . . by the end of this book the reader will agree that . . . inexorable social forces are carrying us to the eventual abolition of the death penalty. (New York Times Book Review)
Now available in paperback ISBN: 038079246X
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Women and the Death Penalty in the United States, 1900-1998: Kathleen A. O'Shea
Using a historical framework, this book offers not only the penal history of the death penalty in the states that have given women the death penalty, but it also retells the stories of the women who have been executed and those currently awaiting their fate on death row.
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Women and the Criminal Justice System: Katherine S. Van Wormer, Clemens Bartollas
Women and the Criminal Justice System focuses heavily on gender and ethnic diversity and on the strengths of oppressed people, especially women of color in criminal justice and social work. A wide range of issues are covered, from the rate of early childhood sexual abuse victimization in female inmates, to estimates of instances of male prison-guard-on-female-inmate rape, to the rate of women lawyers achieving partnerships in their firms. The authors provide a wealth of recent data drawn from both official and international human rights sources. The final portion of the book includes text and personal interview materials that are devoted to the justice occupations records of women's progress and setbacks in entering the traditionally male dominated fields of policing, the law, and corrections. For anyone interested in issues of race, class, and gender in criminal justice and social work.
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Women On The Row: Revelations From Both Sides of the Bars: Kathleen A. O'Shea
A social worker doing research on female offenders, O'Shea tells the stories of women on death row in US prisons. She offers neither a treatise against the death penalty nor an apologia for female innocence, but focuses on the interconnectedness of women's lives, juxtaposing experiences of the convicts with her own on the outside. (Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
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Wounds That Do Not Bind: Victim-based Perspectives on the Death Penalty
: James R. Acker and David Reed Karp
This volume presents perspectives of murder victims’ family members, academics, and crime victims’ advocates regarding an intensely debated issue about which surprisingly little information exists: the significance of capital punishment to murder victims’ survivors. The book includes more than twenty chapters that examine a variety of issues concerning these survivors, or co-victims, and the death penalty. These chapters present the personal accounts of victims’ family members’ experiences with the criminal justice system and examine relevant legal and research issues, including the use of victim impact evidence in capital trials, how the capital punishment process affects co-victims, what is known about the immediate and long-term needs of murder victims’ survivors, and how those needs can be addressed.
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The Wrong Man: The Final Verdict On The Dr. Sam
Sheppard Murder CaseJames Neff
The real-life murder that became known as “The Fugitive” case began before dawn on July 4, 1954, in a Cleveland suburb, when Marilyn Sheppard was viciously beaten to death in her bed. After an inadequate investigation, her husband, Dr. Sam Sheppard, was charged with the crime, and a chain of events was set in motion that has caused more speculation, more publicity, and more cultural myth than any other American murder.
James Neff is an award-winning investigative journalist who, over the past ten years, has assembled the most compete set of Sheppard records in existence, including DNA analyses and interviews with every living person central to the case. He has also gained unprecedented access to crime-scene evidence that shows conclusively that Sham Sheppard did not murder his wife-and points to the man who did. Peeling away the layers of fiction surrounding the case, Neff uncovers the factual events and the key players in a story that until now has been shrouded in mystery. The Wrong Man is a landmark work, a gripping narrative, and indeed the final verdict on America’s most famous unsolved murder
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The Wrong Man: Michael Mello
One of the strengths of Michael Mello’s vivid and disturbing book, The Wrong Man, is that he has stripped away the anonymity and revealed a flesh-and-blood human being in anguish over his pending death. Mello has laid bare the torturing years of an innocent man’s struggle against the state’s machinery of death. The Wrong Man works not just as compelling social commentary, but also as high drama. Mello’s staccato delivery of the events leading up to Spaziano’s execution is riveting.
(Trial Magazine)
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The Wrong Men: America's Epidemic of Wrongful Death-Row Convictions: Stanley Cohen (October 2003)
As the title suggests, Cohen (The Man in the Crowd) examines some 100 instances where people sentenced to death were later exonerated, most of them ultimately proven innocent of the crimes for which they were condemned. The capsule profiles of the exonerated are often too sketchy to be fully satisfactory. Still, Cohen makes his case that innocent people regularly receive death sentences merely through the cumulative effect of the stories. Cohen also analyzes the chief reasons why wrongful convictions occur so frequently. Eyewitness error is a prime factor, whether because of simple mistake or pressure from law enforcement officials. Again, prosecutors avid for convictions distort trials by inducing or winking at perjury or by suppressing evidence favorable to the accused. Other wrongful convictions are attributed to junk science, such as having witnesses' memories stimulated by amateur hypnotists. The author's explanations of these sources of capital error are straightforward and clarified by well-chosen examples. DNA analysis, as the book also explains, has become the main vehicle for exonerating the innocent, but in many cases no DNA evidence is available. Cohen believes the death penalty will soon be relegated to the "dark and distant past," and this volume is a convincing argument for the unreliability of capital convictions.
(Publishers Weekly)
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You Shall Not Kill or You Shall Not Murder?: The Assault on a Biblical Text: Wilma Ann Bailey
Customer Review - Jeremy Hull (Winnipeg Manitoba (Canada):
You may be surprised, as I was, to find out that many newer American translations of the Bible have substituted "You Shall Not Murder" for "You Shall Not Kill" in the Ten Commandments. In this book Wilma Bailey, an Old Testament scholar and professor, shows how and when this change came about. Reviewing word usage in the key Hebrew texts she demonstrates that "murder" is not a fair translation of the original Hebrew word used in the Bible, and she builds a strong case that the revisionist translations were made in response to social and political changes within various religions and within American society in the late 20th century.
The book is based on scholarly analysis and Bailey's extensive knowledge of Hebrew and the history of biblical translations is impressive. Equally impressive is the ethical passion that shines through, when, having made her case and presented all the evidence and arguments, she decries these mistranslations that are, in effect, giving us permission to stop worrying about our collective responsibility for mistreating our fellow humans whether through wars or other means. At one point she sums it up this way: "People want to kill people, and they want biblical permission to do it."
I highly recommend this book for those interested in ethics and the history of how the various Christian and Jewish traditions have dealt with the question of killing.
Customer Review - Carol Blank (Columbia, MD, USA):
The first sentence of the preface of this book caught me by surprise: Sometime in the middle of the twentieth century, it said, the commandment "You shall not kill "(Exod 20:13) became "You shall not murder" in many English Bible translations. The author briefly notes two common reasons given for the change. The first is that the Hebrew word in Exodus means murder "everywhere in the Bible," a notion that she disputes in the first chapter. The second is that killing is not only permitted, but sanctioned by God in other parts of the Bible, an idea she labels as faulty though not false, since interpretation is subjective. The rest of this slim and informative book looks at the change to English translations within four traditions that publish their own translations: American forms of Evangelical Protestantism, Mainline Protestantism, Judaism, and Roman Catholicism, which, unlike the others, has maintained the older wording, "Thou shalt not kill."
In discussing the changes to the commandment by Evangelical Protestants, she points out (1) evangelicals consider the Bible their primary, and sometimes their only, source of authority, a document that contains or IS God's word (2) despite the implications of that common belief, evangelicals seemed to accept with ease the newer translation in which the commandment prohibits "murder" instead of killing. On the other hand, the translation of choice for evangelicals is the King James Version, which contains "Thou shalt not kill."
Such is the meat of this book, which, as would be expected, delves into political and ethical questions related to killing in war and self defense, the death penalty, euthanasia, and abortion. There's a lot of substance here to enlighten readers about the practices of a variety of denominations and encourage them to reflect on the issue of killing and murder in American society today.
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