[PDF] The Death Penalty Approaches The 1990s eBook

Author : Brandon Garrett
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 343 pages
File Size : 38,8 MB
Release : 2017-09-25
Category : History
ISBN : 0674970993

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An awakening -- Inevitability of innocence -- Mercy vs. justice -- The great American death penalty decline -- The defense lawyering effect -- Murder insurance -- The other death penalty -- The execution decline -- End game -- The triumph of mercy

Author : National Research Council
Publisher : National Academies Press
Page : 144 pages
File Size : 16,71 MB
Release : 2012-05-26
Category : Law
ISBN : 0309254167

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Many studies during the past few decades have sought to determine whether the death penalty has any deterrent effect on homicide rates. Researchers have reached widely varying, even contradictory, conclusions. Some studies have concluded that the threat of capital punishment deters murders, saving large numbers of lives; other studies have concluded that executions actually increase homicides; still others, that executions have no effect on murder rates. Commentary among researchers, advocates, and policymakers on the scientific validity of the findings has sometimes been acrimonious. Against this backdrop, the National Research Council report Deterrence and the Death Penalty assesses whether the available evidence provides a scientific basis for answering questions of if and how the death penalty affects homicide rates. This new report from the Committee on Law and Justice concludes that research to date on the effect of capital punishment on homicide rates is not useful in determining whether the death penalty increases, decreases, or has no effect on these rates. The key question is whether capital punishment is less or more effective as a deterrent than alternative punishments, such as a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Yet none of the research that has been done accounted for the possible effect of noncapital punishments on homicide rates. The report recommends new avenues of research that may provide broader insight into any deterrent effects from both capital and noncapital punishments.

Author : M. Watt Espy
Publisher : Inter-University Consortium for Political & Social Research
Page : 124 pages
File Size : 47,76 MB
Release : 1987
Category : Social Science
ISBN :

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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 : Welsh S. White
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 12,55 MB
Release : 1991
Category : History
ISBN : 9780472064618

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An up-to-date examination of legal changes and shifting attitudes surrounding capital punishment

Author : Maurice Chammah
Publisher : Crown
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 45,19 MB
Release : 2021-01-26
Category : Law
ISBN : 1524760277

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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 : Mikaela Janet Malsin
Publisher :
Page : 458 pages
File Size : 40,33 MB
Release : 2016
Category :
ISBN :

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This dissertation offers a rhetorical history of the Supreme Court's capital punishment jurisprudence through four pivotal cases, each capturing the rhetorical milieu of a decade: the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, respectively. I interrogate the fractured judicial voice, constitutive rhetoric, and pathos as I analyze Furman v. Georgia, McCleskey v. Kemp, Payne v. Tennessee, and Callins v. Collins. My readings suggest that in each capital punishment case, the justices wrangled over the nature of rhetoric and its role in justifying or invalidating capital punishment. Each analysis, then, identifies the fundamental rhetorical negotiations that animated the justices' opinions. I argue that in Furman, the question of capital punishment's constitutionality revealed a broader conflict over the Court's role in making decisions of life and death. I isolate three loci of the rhetorical struggle at the heart of that conflict, drawing upon the rhetoric of social change, the rhetoric of history, and stasis theory to illuminate the rhetoricity of the Court's dilemmas. I read McCleskey v. Kemp as a negotiation over the constitutive functions of judicial rhetoric, in which the majority opinions rejected a notion of the Court's rhetoric as constitutive even as they constituted particular visions of social scientific evidence and of racial discrimination. By contrast, the minority opinions in McCleskey embraced the constitutive functions of judicial rhetoric. I assess the last two cases from the early 1990s as conflicting approaches to the role of emotion in capital punishment decisionmaking. The majority's decision in Payne validated the emotional undertones of disgust and vengeance toward the defendant and compassion for the victims, while Blackmun's dissent in Callins focused on compassion for the defendant. The Court in Payne also deflected the emotionality of its own rhetoric, while the Callins dissent explicitly leveraged its emotionality. I conclude with a discussion of the current state of the Court's death penalty jurisprudence and reflect upon the historical and rhetorical implications of the project.