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Language
English
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Description
America'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...
Author
Publisher
Dell
Pub. Date
2012, c2006
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8.1 - AR Pts: 20
Language
English
Description
In the town of Ada, Oklahoma, Ron Williamson was going to be the next Mickey Mantle. But on his way to the Big Leagues, Ron stumbled, his dreams broken by drinking, drugs, and women. Then, on a winter night in 1982, not far from Ron’s home, a young cocktail waitress named Debra Sue Carter was savagely murdered. The investigation led nowhere. Until, on the flimsiest evidence, it led to Ron Williamson. The washed-up small-town hero was charged, tried,...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.2 - AR Pts: 7
Language
English
Description
Imagine having everything taken away from you-permanently-with no hope of resuming a normal life. This is the case for many teenagers in America who are tried and convicted as adults for the crime of murder. Here Susan Kuklin takes you behind bars for frank interviews with a collection of young men who will spend the better part of their lives in jail. She lets them speak for themselves, providing the raw details of their incarceration and the anger,...
Author
Language
English
Description
A gripping exploration of a jury's members' perspectives on the most wrenching decision: the death sentence
With a life in the balance, a jury convicts a man of murder and now has to decide whether he should be put to death. Twelve people now face a momentous choice.
Bringing drama to life, A Life and Death Decision gives unique insight into how a jury deliberates. We feel the passions, anger, and despair as the jurors grapple with legal, moral,...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
The last meals of death row convicts fascinate us because they offer an insight into a disturbed mind shortly before its owner's death. The last meal is a way for the system to offer a last-minute nod to humanity--that although these murderers, rapists, and villains listed inside may have performed inhuman acts, they are still indeed human.
The irony of feeding a criminal before killing them by electrocution or lethal injection is not missed...
Author
Language
English
Description
How long did the guillotine's blade hang over the heads of French criminals? Was it abandoned in the late 1800s? Did French citizens of the early days of the twentieth century decry its brutality? No. The blade was allowed to do its work well into our own time. In 1974, Hamida Djandoubi brutally tortured 22 year-old Elisabeth Bousquet in an apartment in Marseille, putting cigarettes out on her body and lighting her on fire, finally strangling her...
8) 12 angry men
Publisher
MGM Home Entertainment Incorporated
Pub. Date
[2001]
Language
English
Description
Depicts a jury of men who must decide the fate of a teenage boy who has murdered his abusive father. The jurors are from all walks of life, and bring with them their own opinions, prejudices, fears, and personal demons.
Author
Language
English
Description
Billy Wayne Sinclair was only 21 when he heard the Louisiana judge pronounce these words: "I hereby sentence you to death in the electric chair." It was the culmination of a botched holdup committed the year before in which Billy had accidentally shot and killed a man. Billy spent the next 40 years in Angola Prison, one of the country's worst, six of those years on death row. When in 1972 the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty as arbitrary...
Author
Language
English
Description
For twelve years Robert Blecker, a criminal law professor, wandered freely inside Lorton Central Prison, armed only with cigarettes and a tape recorder. The Death of Punishment tests legal philosophy against the reality and wisdom of street criminals and their guards. Some killers' poignant circumstances should lead us to mercy; others show clearly why they should die. After thousands of hours over twenty-five years inside maximum security prisons...
11) Life after death
Author
Publisher
Blue Rider Press
Pub. Date
c2012
Language
English
Description
Falsely accused of murdering three eight-year-old boys in Arkansas, eighteen-year-old Echols, deemed the "ringleader" of the West Memphis Three, was sentenced to death. Then in August 2011 the WMT were released. In these pages, Echols describes the terrors he experienced every day and his outrage toward the American justice system, and offers a firsthand account of living on Death Row in heartbreaking, agonizing detail.
Author
Language
English
Description
In the post-civil war American south, the despicable act of lynching was commonplace and considered to be a form of vigilantism that was used to murder African Americans for alleged "crimes" ranging from acting suspiciously to "insulting whites". In "The Red Record", Ida Bell Wells-Barnett records statistics concerning instances of lynching and offers vivid descriptions of the extrajudicial killings in an attempt to galvanise the public into action...
Author
Language
English
Description
Drawing from legal and extralegal discourse but focusing on imaginative literature, Literary Executions examines representations of, responses to, and arguments for and against the death penalty in the United States over the long nineteenth century. John Cyril Barton creates a generative dialogue between artistic relics and legal history. He looks to novels, short stories, poems, and creative nonfiction as well as legislative reports, trial transcripts,...
Author
Language
English
Description
In the post-civil war American south, the despicable act of lynching was commonplace and considered to be a form of vigilantism that was used to murder African Americans for alleged "crimes" ranging from acting suspiciously to "insulting whites". In Wells' 1892 book "Southern Horrors - Lynch Law in All its Phases", Ida Bell Wells-Barnett describes many horrific instances when the law turned a blind eye to the barbaric practice of lynching, in an attempt...
Author
Language
English
Description
With Whigs and Hunters, the author of The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson plunged into the murky waters of the early eighteenth century to chart the violently conflicting currents that boiled beneath the apparent calm of the time. The subject is the Black Act, a law of unprecedented savagery passed by Parliament in 1723 to deal with 'wicked and evil-disposed men going armed in disguise'. These men were pillaging the royal forest...
Author
Language
English
Description
In 1919, Lewis E. Lawes moved his wife and young daughters into the warden's mansion at Sing Sing prison. They shared a yard with 1,096 of the toughest inmates in the world-murderers, rapists, and thieves who Lawes alone believed capable of redemption. Adamantly opposed to the death penalty, Lawes presided over 300 executions. His progressive ideas shocked many, but he taught the nation that a prison was a community. He allowed a kidnapper to care...
Author
Language
English
Description
"My Experiences as an Executioner" is a 1892 memoir by English executioner James Berry (1852–1913). Berry was most notable for his contribution to the science of hanging, refining the long drop method developed by William Marwood so as to reduce the mental and physical suffering of those hanged. In this volume, Berry offers insights into the various methods he employed as an executioner and what it was like witnessing people's final moments. Contents...
Author
Language
English
Description
An eye-opening guide to the public execution practice of hanging criminals in body-shaped cages as a crime deterrent or religious punishment.
The history of gibbeting is the story of one of Britain's most brutal forms of punishments, the hanging of criminals in a body shaped metal cage as a warning and as a form of justice. From the folklore of live gibbetings to the eerie historical documenting of this weird post-execution tradition, The History...
19) Against the Death Penalty: Writings from the First Abolitionists-Giuseppe Pelli and Cesare Beccaria
Author
Language
English
Description
Peter Garnsey is emeritus professor of the history of classical antiquity at the University of Cambridge and emeritus fellow of Jesus College. His recent books include Thinking about Property: From Antiquity to the Age of Revolution and, with Richard Saller, The Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture.
The first known abolitionist critique of the death penalty-here for the first time in English
In 1764, a Milanese aristocrat named Cesare Beccaria...
Author
Language
English
Description
Between the beginning of the First World War in the summer of 1914 and the armistice in 1918, 51 men were executed in Britain. The great majority, over 80%, were hanged for murder, but in addition to this, 11 men were shot by firing squad at the Tower of London. One traitor and one spy were also hanged. First World War Trials and Executions tells the story of the most interesting and noteworthy of these executions and the crimes which led up to them.
Most...
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