Capital Punishment

Capital Punishment

Author: Billy Wayne Sinclair

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2011-07-01

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1628721340

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Billy Wayne Sinclair was only twenty-one when sentenced to death. Because of an accidental shooting, he spent the next forty years in prison. When the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty, Billy was re-sentenced to life without parole. Here, he offers a blistering examination of the death penalty and its origins.


Survivor on Death Row

Survivor on Death Row

Author: Romell Broom Clare Nonhebel

Publisher:

Published: 2019-03-17

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 9781795025034

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Death Row prisoner kept caged for 34 years for a crime he had never heard of. Date set for his execution - September 15, 2009. A two-hour painful attempt to inject lethal chemicals fails .....and he walks out alive, saying: 'God saved my life, because I'm innocent of this crime.' Now the State of Ohio wants to kill him. Again. His request for a new legal team has been denied. His case is closed. His voice has never been heard .... until now.'Survivor on Death Row' is his own story. "A horrifying story embracing all the evils of the death penalty. Bad forensics, dodgy DNA, awful lawyers, render this a must-read."Jon Snow, Channel 4 News "The Romell Broom case is yet another example of why the United States should abolish the death penalty immediately. The inherent flaws of the capital punishment system are again exposed in all their horror as we are left to ponder how many other individuals will have to go through this nightmare." Rick Halperin, former Chair, Amnesty International USA "I knew that inept doctors could kill you, but I didn't realize that incompetent lawyers can also get you killed."Sister Helen Prejean ('Dead Man Walking') in 'The Death of Innocents' "There has never been a case when the [United States Supreme] court has accepted that the 'mere' fact that a prisoner is innocent should be a constitutional basis for ordering his release." Clive Stafford Smith, OBE, founder of Reprieve, in 'Injustice'


Death Row Welcomes You

Death Row Welcomes You

Author: Steven Hale

Publisher: Melville House

Published: 2024-03-19

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1612199232

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In the vein of Waiting for an Echo and Dead Man Walking, a deeply immersive look at justice in America, told through the interwoven lives of condemned prisoners and the men and women who come to visit them . . . In 2018, after nearly a decade’s hiatus, the state of Tennessee began executing death row inmates, bucking national trends that showed the death penalty in decline. In less than two years, the state put seven men to death, more than any other state but Texas in that time period. It was an execution spree unlike any seen in Tennessee since the 1940s, one only brought to a halt by a global pandemic. Award-winning journalist Steven Hale was the leading reporter on these executions, covering them both locally for the Nashville Scene alt-weekly and nationally for The Appeal. In Death Row Welcomes You, Hale traces the lives of condemned prisoners at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution—and the people who come to visit them. What brought them—the visitors and convicted murderers alike—to death row? The visitors are, for the most part, not activists—or at least they did not start out that way. Nor are they the sort of killer-obsessed death row groupies such settings sometimes attract. In fact, in most cases they are average people whose lives, not to mention their views on the death penalty, were turned upside down by a face-to-face meeting with a death row prisoner. Hale’s access to the people that make up that community afforded him a perspective that no other journalist has been granted, largely because Tennessee’s Department of Correction has all but shut off official media access. Combining topics that have long fascinated readers—crime, death, and life inside prison—Hale writes with humanity, empathy, and insight earned by befriending death row prisoners . . . and standing witness to their final moments.


Killing Justice in the Lone Star State

Killing Justice in the Lone Star State

Author: Michael O’Brien

Publisher: Waterside Press

Published: 2021-06-15

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 190997692X

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Killing Justice in the Lone Star State is a reality check on active Death Row cases (and some post-execution ones). The book offers a fresh perspective for campaigners and reformers which ranges across theory, policy and practice. It also explains the much criticised Texas ‘law of parties.’ ‘A must read, an excellent new book by Mike O’Brien... A powerful critique... a critical comparative analysis of USA/UK human rights standards. Packed with cases. A compelling case for abolition.’-- Dr Michael Naughton, Bristol University, Empowering the Innocent Project. Many organizations are engaged in a race to prevent the execution of death sentenced prisoners in Texas (and elsewhere in the USA). Some men and women on Death Row claim to be completely innocent as described in this book. Michael O’Brien — who was himself wrongly convicted of murder — dissects cases with the eye of someone who has spent years watching how miscarriages of justice happen and why. He explains how practitioners and others are in denial and tunnel vision helps to sustain politicians, livelihoods and profits that depend on a conveyor belt from the courts to the execution chamber. He describes a killing process aided by bias, discrimination, prejudice, unfair trials, supposed expert evidence and closed minds. This is just one hallmark of a country obsessed with guns, violence and the ultimate penalty. Texas is the most punitive place within one of the harshest penal systems in the world. But no legal system should take away human lives, especially one tarnished by defects of the kind the author sets out in this book. Extract ‘Can you just imagine being an individual who is innocent but facing execution, whether in Texas or elsewhere? Or you were on Death Row but you did not take part in any killings, just got caught up in the hysteria? Can you picture the pressure and abject loneliness of serving 15 years or more, and then the State setting a date to kill you?’


Death Row, Texas

Death Row, Texas

Author: Michelle Lyons

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2018-11-27

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 1612438903

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“Tells the story of a traumatic life spent witnessing hundreds of people being executed in Texas’ most infamous prison.” —Daily Beast “I can’t remember his name or his crime. What I remember is the nothingness. No family members, no friends, no comfort. Maybe he didn’t want them to come, maybe they didn’t care, maybe he didn’t have any in the first place. It was just a prison official and two reporters, including me, looking through the glass at this man strapped fast to the gurney, needles in both arms, staring hard at the ceiling. When the warden stepped forward and asked if he wanted to make a last statement, the man barely shook his head, said nothing and started blinking. That’s when I saw it: a single tear at the corner of his right eye. A tear he desperately wanted to blink away, a tear he didn’t want us to see. It pooled there for a moment before running down his cheek. The warden gave his signal, the chemicals started flowing, the man coughed, sputtered and exhaled. A doctor entered the room, pronounced the man dead and pulled a sheet over his head.” —Michelle Lyons, from the Prologue Michelle Lyons witnessed nearly 300 executions at the Texas State penitentiary. This “haunting, dark and hard to put down” behind-the-scenes look at those final moments of life relates shocking true stories of the inmate, his/her family members, prison officials, the death-row chaplain and the victim’s loved ones—all of whom come together in the death chamber (Houston Chronicle).


Texas death row

Texas death row

Author:

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 1997-01-01

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9781617034886

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Ken Light and his camera were permitted unparalleled access to Texas death row. His stark, powerful images show where and how the condemned live. In the year he took these pictures, fourteen men were executed in Texas. Suzanne Donovan's essay draws upon her interviews with the condemned men and with prison authorities, family members, and members of victims' families. Whoever opens this book will want to look away, for the pictures and words force us to gaze intimately into the eye of death. Light's photographs make us ask what we have done in sanctioning execution. With ninety percent approval, no other place in America has approved the death sentence so overwhelmingly as Texas. Ken Light's raw, austere photographs and the accompanying text reveal what we have created in the hopeless world of court-ordered death. Who are the men who exist there? What do they look like? How do they survive, and what are the rhythms of their daily lives? While outsiders focus on the final act of execution, the real drama unfolds each day in this arcane world.


Writing for Their Lives

Writing for Their Lives

Author: Marie Mulvey Roberts

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0252070992

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A powerful anthology documenting the thoughts and experiences of those waiting to die


Death Row: The Final Minutes

Death Row: The Final Minutes

Author: Michelle Lyons

Publisher: Bonnier Publishing Ltd.

Published: 2018-05-03

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1788700449

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IN 12 YEARS, MICHELLE LYONS WITNESSED NEARLY 300 EXECUTIONS. First as a reporter and then as a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Michelle was a frequent visitor to Huntsville's Walls Unit, where she recorded and relayed the final moments of death row inmates' lives before they were put to death by the state. Michelle was in the death chamber as some of the United States' most notorious criminals, including serial killers, child murderers and rapists, spoke their last words on earth, while a cocktail of lethal drugs surged through their veins. Michelle supported the death penalty, before misgivings began to set in as the executions mounted. During her time in the prison system, and together with her dear friend and colleague, Larry Fitzgerald, she came to know and like some of the condemned men and women she saw die. She began to query the arbitrary nature of the death penalty and ask the question: do executions make victims of all of us? An incredibly powerful and unique look at the complex story of capital punishment, as told by those whose lives have been shaped by it, Death Row: The Final Minutes is an important take on crime and punishment at a fascinating point in America's political history.


Death Row

Death Row

Author: William Bernhardt

Publisher: Fawcett

Published: 2004-02-03

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0345441761

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Oklahoma attorney Ben Kincaid put his reputation on the line when he represented Ray Goldman. The seemingly mild-mannered man was charged with massacring an entire suburban Tulsa family. When the prosecution’s star witness—Erin Faulkner, the lone survivor of the slaughter—took the stand, Goldman’s fate was sealed. But just as his date with the death chamber is imminent, Erin abruptly recants her testimony; after seven years of silence, she is desperate to keep an innocent man from dying. Yet the next day, Erin is discovered dead, an apparent suicide. And Ben Kincaid is the only witness to her stunning confession. Now Ben must hunt down the killer who is determined to cover his tracks . . . with blood.