A Descending Spiral
A Descending Spiral

Author: Marc Bookman

Publisher: The New Press

Published: 2021-06-15

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1620976595

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Powerful, wry essays offering modern takes on a primitive practice, from one of our most widely read death penalty abolitionists As Ruth Bader Ginsburg has noted, people who are well represented at trial rarely get the death penalty. But as Marc Bookman shows in a dozen brilliant essays, the problems with capital punishment run far deeper than just bad representation. Exploring prosecutorial misconduct, racist judges and jurors, drunken lawyering, and executing the innocent and the mentally ill, these essays demonstrate that precious few people on trial for their lives get the fair trial the Constitution demands. Today, death penalty cases continue to capture the hearts, minds, and eblasts of progressives of all stripes—including the rich and famous (see Kim Kardashian’s advocacy)—but few people with firsthand knowledge of America’s “injustice system” have the literary chops to bring death penalty stories to life. Enter Marc Bookman. With a voice that is both literary and journalistic, the veteran capital defense lawyer and seven-time Best American Essays “notable” author exposes the dark absurdities and fatal inanities that undermine the logic of the death penalty wherever it still exists. In essays that cover seemingly “ordinary” capital cases over the last thirty years, Bookman shows how violent crime brings out our worst human instincts—revenge, fear, retribution, and prejudice. Combining these emotions with the criminal legal system’s weaknesses—purposely ineffective, arbitrary, or widely infected with racism and misogyny—is a recipe for injustice. Bookman has been charming and educating readers in the pages of The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and Slate for years. His wit and wisdom are now collected and preserved in A Descending Spiral.

The Solemn Sentence of Death
The Solemn Sentence of Death

Author: Lawrence B. Goodheart

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781558498464

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Traces the evolution of the death penalty in a single state from the colonial era to the present

Punishment by Death; Its Authority and Expediency
Punishment by Death; Its Authority and Expediency

Author: George Barrell Cheever

Publisher: General Books

Published: 2012-02

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 9781458960030

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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VII. VRGUMENT FROM SCRIPTURE CONTINUED. PURPOSE AND DESIGN OP THIS ORDINANCE. ITS SANCTION OF THE CIVIL MAGISTRACY. OF THE ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT. OF ITS POWER TO TAKE LIFE. BENEVOLENT DESIGN OF THIS ORDINANCE. We are to consider in the next place the purpose and design of this ordinance. It must be considered first, as we have already intimated, as containing the sanction and divine authority of a civil magistracy. Doubtless, this was one of its objects. What goes before asserts and promises the providential interposition of God in making inquisition for blood, and visiting the iniquity of bloodshed on those who were guilty of it. But this or- dinance commits into the hands of men the solemn and awful power, authority, and duty of taking vengeance. Whoso sheddeth man's blood, By Man shall his Mood ie shed. Now, as it is not to be supposed for a moment that God meant that any and every individual in the event of a murder should consider himself authorized to kill the murderer; since this would be to produce anarchy instead of order and security in society;?as we cannot suppose that God intended to commit this power at random into the hands of individuals; we must regard it as referring to the formal exercise of justice in the civilgovernment. We are, in fact, compelled to this conclusion, there being no alternative. The learned Huguenot, Andreas Rivetus, among other commentators, has presented this view of the Noachic ordinance most clearly and satisfactorily, at the same time adducing and refuting the objections of the Socinians, Anabaptists, and others, who, he says, endeavoured to corrupt the passage and elude its force. Est igitur hoc loco Siaraftia, seu constitutio Dei ipsius ore prolata, qua sanguis homicides voluntarii, qui humanum sanguinem aus...