Rites of Execution

Rites of Execution

Author: Louis P. Masur

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 0195066634

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This study examines the conflict over capital punishment and the transformation of American culture between the Revolution and the Civil War.


The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment

The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment

Author: Austin Sarat

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2005-05-27

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9780804752343

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How does the way we think and feel about the world around us affect the existence and administration of the death penalty? What role does capital punishment play in defining our political and cultural identity? In this volume the authors argue that in order to understand the death penalty we need to know more about the “cultural lives”—past and present—of the state’s ultimate sanction.


Capital Punishment

Capital Punishment

Author: Bruce E. R. Thompson

Publisher: Greenhaven Publishing LLC

Published: 2009-06-25

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0737746335

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This volume provides an abundance of information on the history of capital punishment, and ongoing opposition to it. Author Bruce E.R. Thompson includes narratives on well-known figures on both sides of the issue. Various methods of execution are explained and their use placed in historical context. Legal terminology important to the debate is defined and explained.


Exile and Embrace

Exile and Embrace

Author: Anthony Santoro

Publisher: UPNE

Published: 2013-07-09

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1555538185

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With passion and precision, Exile and Embrace examines the key elements of the religious debates over capital punishment and shows how they reflect the values and self-understandings of contemporary Americans. Santoro demonstrates that capital punishment has relatively little to do with the perpetrators and much more to do with those who would impose the punishment. Because of this, he convincingly argues, we should focus our attention not on the perpetrators and victims, as is typically the case in debates pro and con about the death penalty, but on ourselves and on the mechanisms that we use to impose or oppose the death penalty. An important book that will appeal to those involved in the death penalty debate and to general religious studies and American studies scholars, as well.


Let the Lord Sort Them

Let the Lord Sort Them

Author: Maurice Chammah

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2022-01-18

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1524760285

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NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A deeply reported, searingly honest portrait of the death penalty in Texas—and what it tells us about crime and punishment in America “If you’re one of those people who despair that nothing changes, and dream that something can, this is a story of how it does.”—Anand Giridharadas, The New York Times Book Review WINNER OF THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS AWARD In 1972, the United States Supreme Court made a surprising ruling: the country’s death penalty system violated the Constitution. The backlash was swift, especially in Texas, where executions were considered part of the cultural fabric, and a dark history of lynching was masked by gauzy visions of a tough-on-crime frontier. When executions resumed, Texas quickly became the nationwide leader in carrying out the punishment. Then, amid a larger wave of criminal justice reform, came the death penalty’s decline, a trend so durable that even in Texas the punishment appears again close to extinction. In Let the Lord Sort Them, Maurice Chammah charts the rise and fall of capital punishment through the eyes of those it touched. We meet Elsa Alcala, the orphaned daughter of a Mexican American family who found her calling as a prosecutor in the nation’s death penalty capital, before becoming a judge on the state’s highest court. We meet Danalynn Recer, a lawyer who became obsessively devoted to unearthing the life stories of men who committed terrible crimes, and fought for mercy in courtrooms across the state. We meet death row prisoners—many of them once-famous figures like Henry Lee Lucas, Gary Graham, and Karla Faye Tucker—along with their families and the families of their victims. And we meet the executioners, who struggle openly with what society has asked them to do. In tracing these interconnected lives against the rise of mass incarceration in Texas and the country as a whole, Chammah explores what the persistence of the death penalty tells us about forgiveness and retribution, fairness and justice, history and myth. Written with intimacy and grace, Let the Lord Sort Them is the definitive portrait of a particularly American institution.


A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse

A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse

Author: Richard Ward

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-09-27

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 1137444010

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Through studies of beheaded Irish traitors, smugglers hung in chains on the English coast, suicides subjected to the surgeon's knife in Dresden and the burial of executed Nazi war criminals, this volume provides a fresh perspective on the history of capital punishment. The chapters 'Introduction: A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse' and 'The Gibbet in the Landscape: Locating the Criminal Corpse in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England' are open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.


Law and Religion in American History

Law and Religion in American History

Author: Mark Douglas McGarvie

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-07-18

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1316684148

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This book furthers dialogue on the separation of church and state with an approach that emphasizes intellectual history and the constitutional theory that underlies American society. Mark Douglas McGarvie explains that the founding fathers of America considered the right of conscience to be an individual right, to be protected against governmental interference. While the religion clauses enunciated this right, its true protection occurred in the creation of separate public and private spheres. Religion and the churches were placed in the private sector. Yet, politically active Christians have intermittently mounted challenges to this bifurcation in calling for a greater public role for Christian faith and morality in American society. Both students and scholars will learn much from this intellectual history of law and religion that contextualizes a four-hundred-year-old ideological struggle.


The International Library of Essays on Capital Punishment, Volume 3

The International Library of Essays on Capital Punishment, Volume 3

Author: Peter Hodgkinson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 784

ISBN-13: 1351887475

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This volume provides analyses of a range of subjects and issues in the death penalty debate, from medicine to the media. The essays address in particular the personal complexities of those involved, a fundamental part of the subject usually overridden by the theoretical and legal aspects of the debate. The unique personal vantage offered by this volume makes it essential reading for anyone interested in going beyond the removed theoretical understanding of the death penalty, to better comprehending its fundamental humanity. Additionally, the international range of the analysis, enabling disaggregation of country specific motivations, ensures the complexities of the death penalty are also considered from a global perspective.


Law's Imagined Republic

Law's Imagined Republic

Author: Steven Wilf

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-04-19

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0521196906

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Law's Imagined Republic shows how the American Revolution was marked by the rapid proliferation of law talk across the colonies. This legal language was both elite and popular, spanned different forms of expression from words to rituals, and included simultaneously real and imagined law. Since it was employed to mobilize resistance against England, the proliferation of revolutionary legal language became intimately intertwined with politics. Drawing on a wealth of material from criminal cases, Steven Wilf reconstructs the intertextual ways Americans from the 1760s through the 1790s read law: reading one case against another and often self-consciously comparing transatlantic legal systems as they thought about how they might construct their own legal system in a new republic. What transformed extraordinary tales of crime into a political forum? How did different ways of reading or speaking about law shape our legal origins? And, ultimately, how might excavating innovative approaches to law in this formative period, which were constructed in the street as well as in the courtroom, alter our usual understanding of contemporary American legal institutions? Law's Imagined Republic tells the story of the untidy beginnings of American law.


"Liberty to the Downtrodden"

Author: Matthew J. Grow

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-12-01

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0300136102

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Thomas L. Kane (1822-1883), a crusader for antislavery, women's rights, and the downtrodden, rose to prominence in his day as the most ardent and persuasive defender of Mormons' religious liberty. Though not a Mormon, Kane sought to defend the much-reviled group from the "Holy War" waged against them by evangelical America. His courageous personal intervention averted a potentially catastrophic bloody conflict between federal troops and Mormon settlers in the now nearly forgotten Utah War of 1857-58. Drawing on extensive, newly available archives, this book is the first to tell the full story of Kane's extraordinary life. The book illuminates his powerful Philadelphia family, his personal life and eccentricities, his reform achievements, his place in Mormon history, and his career as a Civil War general. Further, the book revises previous understandings of nineteenth-century reform, showing how Kane and likeminded others fused Democratic Party ideology, anti-evangelicalism, and romanticism.