NCJ Number
185152
Date Published
1998
Length
279 pages
Annotation
This book takes the reader on a step-by-step journey through the American execution process, based on interviews with prisoners who have spent years on death row, prison staff who guard the condemned, and the men who act as executioners.
Abstract
This second edition has been revised in a number of ways. All statistics and sources have been reviewed and updated where appropriate. Relevant new research on the death penalty, including work done by the author as a follow-up to the original study, has been woven into the text, leading to a refinement and, in some cases, extension of many of the observations and conclusions about the modern execution process presented in the first edition. The second edition also offers a fuller examination of the history and evolution of the death penalty in America, covering execution rituals from colonial times to the present. This history includes a pattern of illegal executions (lynchings), which in this edition have been examined in relation to legal executions, especially in the South. The key issue of race, which is crucial in both historical and contemporary terms, is considered in depth. Race is viewed by the author as having played a role in both the rate and the ritual of legal and illegal executions. The effects of executions on contemporary American society, particularly if executions were to be televised, are also considered. Finally, the death penalty is reviewed in the context of newly developing international human rights case law. This emerging body of law portrays the death penalty, particularly after lengthy death row confinement (the norm in America), as an instance of "cruel treatment and torture." Chapter notes and a subject index