BOOKS: ​“Cruel and Unusual: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment”

A clas­sic book about the death penal­ty has recent­ly been re-pub­lished and is now avail­able in paper­back and elec­tron­ic form. Cruel and Unusual: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment was writ­ten by Michael Meltsner, cur­rent­ly a pro­fes­sor at Northeastern University School of Law, and one of the key archi­tects at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund behind the chal­lenge that led to Furman v. Georgia in 1972. This Supreme Court deci­sion result­ed in over­turn­ing every death penal­ty law and every death sen­tence in the coun­try. The book traces the his­to­ry of that case and fits it into oth­er sig­nif­i­cant events in the 1960s and ear­ly 1970s. In a new Foreward to the book, Dr. Evan Mandery, an Associate Professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, writes, ​“This is the best and most impor­tant [book ever writ­ten about the death penal­ty in America.] … 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.”

(M. Meltsner, ​“Cruel and Unusual: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment,” Quid Pro Books, 2011; orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in 1973 by Random House). See U.S. Supreme Court and Books on the death penalty.