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Author: Hugo Adam Bedau
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2005-03-24
Total Pages: 260
ISBN-13: 9780195179804
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExperts on both side of the issue speak out both for and against capital punishment and the rationale behind their individual beliefs.
Author: Ernest Van den Haag
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 2013-06-29
Total Pages: 314
ISBN-13: 1489927875
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom 1965 until 1980, there was a virtual moratorium on executions for capital offenses in the United States. This was due primarily to protracted legal proceedings challenging the death penalty on constitutional grounds. After much Sturm und Drang, the Supreme Court of the United States, by a divided vote, finally decided that "the death penalty does not invariably violate the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause of the Eighth Amendment." The Court's decisions, however, do not moot the controversy about the death penalty or render this excellent book irrelevant. The ball is now in the court of the Legislature and the Executive. Leg islatures, federal and state, can impose or abolish the death penalty, within the guidelines prescribed by the Supreme Court. A Chief Executive can commute a death sentence. And even the Supreme Court can change its mind, as it has done on many occasions and did, with respect to various aspects of the death penalty itself, durlog the moratorium period. Also, the people can change their minds. Some time ago, a majority, according to reliable polls, favored abolition. Today, a substantial majority favors imposition of the death penalty. The pendulum can swing again, as it has done in the past.
Author: Russell G. Murphy
Publisher:
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 334
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Through the statements of witnesses who testified at historic hearings in New York between December 2004 and February 2005, [the book] seeks to educate a national and international citizenry about capital punishment. ... present[ing] the essential facts relating to the death penalty and the major categories of debate over capital punishment worldwide"--Introd.
Author: Maurice Chammah
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2021-01-26
Total Pages: 368
ISBN-13: 1524760277
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A deeply reported, searingly honest portrait of the death penalty in Texas—and what it tells us about crime and punishment in America “If you’re one of those people who despair that nothing changes, and dream that something can, this is a story of how it does.”—Anand Giridharadas, The New York Times Book Review WINNER OF THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS AWARD In 1972, the United States Supreme Court made a surprising ruling: the country’s death penalty system violated the Constitution. The backlash was swift, especially in Texas, where executions were considered part of the cultural fabric, and a dark history of lynching was masked by gauzy visions of a tough-on-crime frontier. When executions resumed, Texas quickly became the nationwide leader in carrying out the punishment. Then, amid a larger wave of criminal justice reform, came the death penalty’s decline, a trend so durable that even in Texas the punishment appears again close to extinction. In Let the Lord Sort Them, Maurice Chammah charts the rise and fall of capital punishment through the eyes of those it touched. We meet Elsa Alcala, the orphaned daughter of a Mexican American family who found her calling as a prosecutor in the nation’s death penalty capital, before becoming a judge on the state’s highest court. We meet Danalynn Recer, a lawyer who became obsessively devoted to unearthing the life stories of men who committed terrible crimes, and fought for mercy in courtrooms across the state. We meet death row prisoners—many of them once-famous figures like Henry Lee Lucas, Gary Graham, and Karla Faye Tucker—along with their families and the families of their victims. And we meet the executioners, who struggle openly with what society has asked them to do. In tracing these interconnected lives against the rise of mass incarceration in Texas and the country as a whole, Chammah explores what the persistence of the death penalty tells us about forgiveness and retribution, fairness and justice, history and myth. Written with intimacy and grace, Let the Lord Sort Them is the definitive portrait of a particularly American institution.
Author: Ted Gottfried
Publisher:
Published: 1997
Total Pages: 136
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKShould a convicted murderer be given the death penalty? Ted Gottfried takes a balanced view and examines the many sides of this issue, discussing the history of capital punishment and specific cases involving this topic.
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Published: 2012-05-26
Total Pages: 144
ISBN-13: 0309254167
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMany studies during the past few decades have sought to determine whether the death penalty has any deterrent effect on homicide rates. Researchers have reached widely varying, even contradictory, conclusions. Some studies have concluded that the threat of capital punishment deters murders, saving large numbers of lives; other studies have concluded that executions actually increase homicides; still others, that executions have no effect on murder rates. Commentary among researchers, advocates, and policymakers on the scientific validity of the findings has sometimes been acrimonious. Against this backdrop, the National Research Council report Deterrence and the Death Penalty assesses whether the available evidence provides a scientific basis for answering questions of if and how the death penalty affects homicide rates. This new report from the Committee on Law and Justice concludes that research to date on the effect of capital punishment on homicide rates is not useful in determining whether the death penalty increases, decreases, or has no effect on these rates. The key question is whether capital punishment is less or more effective as a deterrent than alternative punishments, such as a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Yet none of the research that has been done accounted for the possible effect of noncapital punishments on homicide rates. The report recommends new avenues of research that may provide broader insight into any deterrent effects from both capital and noncapital punishments.
Author: JoAnn Bren Guernsey
Publisher: Twenty-First Century Books
Published: 2009-09-01
Total Pages: 164
ISBN-13: 0761340793
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDiscusses the history of execution, the process from sentencing to execution, moral issues involved in the death penalty, arguments for and against it, and the shrinking number of countries with it.
Author: Louis P. Pojman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2000-01-01
Total Pages: 189
ISBN-13: 0585080682
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTwo distinguished social and political philosophers take opposing positions in this highly engaging work. Louis P. Pojman justifies the practice of execution by appealing to the principle of retribution: we deserve to be rewarded and punished according to the virtue or viciousness of our actions. He asserts that the death penalty does deter some potential murderers and that we risk the lives of innocent people who might otherwise live if we refuse to execute those deserving that punishment. Jeffrey Reiman argues that although the death penalty is a just punishment for murder, we are not morally obliged to execute murderers. Since we lack conclusive evidence that executing murderers is an effective deterrent and because we can foster the advance of civilization by demonstrating our intolerance for cruelty in our unwillingness to kill those who kill others, Reiman concludes that it is good in principle to avoid the death penalty, and bad in practice to impose it.
Author: Scott Turow
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Published: 2010-08-24
Total Pages: 180
ISBN-13: 0374706476
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAmerica's leading writer about the law takes a close, incisive look at one of society's most vexing legal issues Scott Turow is known to millions as the author of peerless novels about the troubling regions of experience where law and reality intersect. In "real life," as a respected criminal lawyer, he has been involved with the death penalty for more than a decade, including successfully representing two different men convicted in death-penalty prosecutions. In this vivid account of how his views on the death penalty have evolved, Turow describes his own experiences with capital punishment from his days as an impassioned young prosecutor to his recent service on the Illinois commission which investigated the administration of the death penalty and influenced Governor George Ryan's unprecedented commutation of the sentences of 164 death row inmates on his last day in office. Along the way, he provides a brief history of America's ambivalent relationship with the ultimate punishment, analyzes the potent reasons for and against it, including the role of the victims' survivors, and tells the powerful stories behind the statistics, as he moves from the Governor's Mansion to Illinois' state-of-the art 'super-max' prison and the execution chamber. Ultimate Punishment, this gripping, clear-sighted, necessary examination of the principles, the personalities, and the politics of a fundamental dilemma of our democracy has all the drama and intellectual substance of Turow's celebrated fiction.
Author: Hugo Adam Bedau
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1998-05-28
Total Pages: 545
ISBN-13: 0199761426
DOWNLOAD EBOOKInThe Death Penalty in America: Current Controversies, Hugo Adam Bedau, one of our preeminent scholars on the subject,provides a comprehensive sourcebook 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--which the New York Times praised as "the most complete, well-edited and comprehensive collection of readings on the pros and cons of the death penalty"--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.
