Women and Capital Punishment in the United States PDF Download

Author: David V. Baker
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476622884
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 439

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Book Description
The history of the execution of women in the United States has largely been ignored and scholars have given scant attention to gender issues in capital punishment. This historical analysis examines the social, political and economic contexts in which the justice system has put women to death, revealing a pattern of patriarchal domination and female subordination. The book includes a discussion of condemned women granted executive clemency and judicial commutations, an inquiry into women falsely convicted in potentially capital cases and a profile of the current female death row population.

Author: Carol S. Steiker
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674737423
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Before constitutional regulation -- The Supreme Court steps in -- The invisibility of race in the constitutional revolution -- Between the Supreme Court and the states -- The failures of regulation -- An unsustainable system? -- Recurring patterns in constitutional regulation -- The future of the American death penalty -- Life after death

Author: Lawrence B. Goodheart
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780367463793
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
"This book is the first to systematically investigate the capital punishment of girls and women in one jurisdiction in the United States during nearly four centuries. Using Connecticut as an essential case study because of its long history as a colony and a state, this study is the first of its kind not only for New England but for the United States. The author uses rich archival sources to look critically at the gendered differential in the application of the death penalty from the seventeenth century until the abolition of capital punishment in Connecticut in 2012. In addition to analyzing cases of executions, this monograph offers an innovative focus on women and girls who escaped judicial execution with death sentences that were avoided, reversed, reprieved, or commuted. The book fully describes the impact of the rise and fall of witchcraft allegations during the last half of the seventeenth century, the clash between the degradation of slavery and Enlightenment ideals that was the provocation for the de facto end of female capital punishment in the New Republic, the introduction of two degrees of murder that effectively provided an escape hatch from the gallows, and a detailed look at the unique case of Lydia Sherman, whose sentence to life in prison under the Connecticut murder statute of 1846 emphatically confirmed the unofficial state exemption of females from the gallows. The book will attract attention from a broad audience interested in criminology, criminal justice, capital punishment, women's studies, and legal history. Anti-death penalty advocates, law school activists, public defenders, capital punishment litigators, and jurists will also find the book useful. Pivotal cases since 1900 are also examined"--

Author: Keith D. Harries
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780847681570
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
The perennially controversial issue of capital punishment has generated especially passionate debate in recent years. In this book, two noted experts on crime provide a geo-historical perspective on capital punishment, showing vividly the incoherencies and contradictions in policies and practices across the country. Going back to the earliest U.S. executions, the authors challenge the belief that capital punishment serves as a deterrent. Using state-of-the-art methods drawn from geographic information systems (GIS), they illustrate the culture of capital punishment and its impact on selected groups, mapping the execution of women, for example, and the origin and diffusion of electrocution, the gas chamber, and lethal injection. This book will be indispensable to anyone--scholar, policy maker, or lay person--who must be informed on the issue of capital punishment.

Author: Hugo Adam Bedau
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780914031017
Category : Capital punishment
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description

Author: Michael Meltsner
Publisher: Quid Pro Books
ISBN: 1610270975
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
The true and gripping account of the nine-year struggle by a small band of lawyers to abolish the death penalty in the United States. Its new edition features a 2011 Foreword by death-penalty author Evan Mandery of CUNY's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, as well as a new Preface by the author.The mission, plotted out over lunch in New York's Central Park in the early 1960s, seemed as impossible as going to the moon: abolish capital punishment in every state. The approach would fight on multiple fronts, with multiple strategies. The people would be dedicated, bright, unsure, unpopular, and fascinating. This is their story: not only the cases and the arguments before courts, the death row inmates and their victims, the judges and politicians urging law and order, this is the true account of the real-life lawyers from the inside. The United States indeed went to the moon, and a few years later the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional. The victory was long-sought and sweet, and the pages of this book vividly let the reader live the struggle and the victory. And while the abolition eventually became as impermanent as the nation's presence on the moon, these dedicated attorneys certainly made a difference. This is their tale.As Evan Mandery writes in his new Foreword, "In these pages, Meltsner lays bare every aspect of his and his colleaguesi thinking. You will read how they handicapped their chances, which arguments they thought would work (you may be surprised), and what they thought of the Supreme Court justices who would decide the crucial cases. You will come to understand what they perceived to be the basis for support for the death penalty, and, with Meltsner's unflinching honesty, what they perceived to be the inconsistencies in their position."Mandery concludes: "It is my odd lot in life to have read almost every major book ever written about the death penalty in America. This is the best and the most important. Every serious scholar who wants to advance an argument about capital punishment in the United States--whether it is abolitionist or in favor of the death penalty, or merely a tactical assessment--cites this book. It is open and supremely accessible." And the author's "constitutional vision was years ahead of its time. His book is timeless." Part of the Legal History and Biography Series from Quid Pro Books, the new ebook editions feature embedded pagination from previous editions (consistent with the new paperback edition as well, allowing continuity in all formats), active TOC and endnotes, and quality digital formatting.

Author: M. Watt Espy
Publisher: Inter-University Consortium for Political & Social Research
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
This study furnishes data on executions performed in the United States under civil authority. It includes a description of each individual executed and the circumstances surrounding the crime for which the person was convicted. Variables include age, race, name, sex, and occupation of the offender, place, jurisdiction, date and method of execution and the crime for which the offender was executed.

Author: James R. Acker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 612

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Book Description
Critically analyze the history, politics, law, empirical evidence, and principled underpinnings of the contemporary debate about the death penalty in America. They also assess likely future trends in capital punishment law and practice.

Author: Maurice Chammah
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 1524760277
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
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.

Author: Hans Toch
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
ISBN: 9781433829000
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
PROSE Award Finalist for Psychology This book synthesizes scholarly reflections with personal accounts from prison administrators and inmates to show the harsh reality of life on death row.