Books

In He Called Me Sister: A True Story of Finding Humanity on Death Row, author Suzanne Craig Robertson details her jour­ney from reluc­tance to true friend­ship dur­ing her chal­leng­ing fif­teen-year rela­tion­ship with Cecil Johnson, a Tennessee death-row pris­on­er, who was exe­cut­ed in December 2009. Using let­ters, poems, and a per­son­al mem­oir writ­ten by Johnson, Robertson tells their mutu­al sto­ry of per­se­ver­ance, recall­ing that ​“dif­fer­ences don’t have to be…

In their forth­com­ing book, ​“The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts,” renowned death-penal­ty attor­ney Stephen B. Bright and legal schol­ar James Kwak describe the many ways in which the U.S. legal sys­tem fails to uphold the con­sti­tu­tion­al rights of defen­dants, espe­cial­ly poor defen­dants and peo­ple of…

In Crossing the River Styx: The Memoir of a Death Row Chaplain, (March 2023), author Russ Ford recounts the abus­es he wit­nessed as the head chap­lain of Virginia’s death row and the strong rela­tion­ships he formed with more than a dozen con­demned pris­on­ers. Through sto­ries, he describes the core of human dig­ni­ty he expe­ri­enced among death row pris­on­ers, as well as the treach­er­ous con­di­tions these indi­vid­u­als faced dur­ing their final…

In Shattered Justice: Crime Victims’ Experiences with Wrongful Convictions and Exonerations, released in August 2022, University of North Carolina-Wilmington soci­ol­o­gy and crim­i­nol­o­gy pro­fes­sor Kimberly Cook explores how crime vic­tims and their fam­i­ly mem­bers expe­ri­ence and process the trau­ma asso­ci­at­ed with the crime itself, the legal process, and the exon­er­a­tion of the per­son they once believed to be the…

Virginia made his­to­ry in 2021 when it became the first Southern state to abol­ish the death penal­ty. Closing the Slaughterhouse: The Inside Story of Death Penalty Abolition in Virginia tells the sto­ry of the commonwealth’s jour­ney from lead­ing exe­cu­tion­er to ground­break­ing abo­li­tion­ist state. Written by jour­nal­ist, author, and anti-death penal­ty advo­cate Dale Brumfield, the book explores Virginia’s his­to­ry sur­round­ing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, start­ing with…

The out­come of a cap­i­tal pros­e­cu­tion can be pre­dict­ed based upon the rel­a­tive social sta­tus of the vic­tim, the defen­dant, and the jurors, apply­ing a soci­ol­o­gy con­cept known as the geo­met­ri­cal the­o­ry of law, accord­ing to the authors of a new book, Geometrical Justice: The Death Penalty in…

The American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Section has released its annu­al report, The State of Criminal Justice 2022, exam­in­ing the state of the American crim­i­nal legal…

“The more peo­ple know about how the sys­tem of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment real­ly works, the less sup­port they will have for that pol­i­cy,” says Marc Bookman, the author of A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays. Bookman’s crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed col­lec­tion of essays — described by Publishers Weekly as ​“a cogent and har­row­ing primer on what’s wrong with cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment” — chan­nels his decades of cap­i­tal lit­i­ga­tion expe­ri­ence into…

Unheard voic­es from death row come to life in the new book, Right Here, Right Now: Life Stories from America’s Death Row. The book, a col­lab­o­ra­tive project between the arts col­lec­tive Hidden Voices and more than 100 men on death rows across the United States, the­mat­i­cal­ly weaves togeth­er their per­son­al nar­ra­tives to cre­ate a com­pre­hen­sive pic­ture of who is on death row, how they got there, what they expe­ri­ence, and why their lives…

In his new book, Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty, jour­nal­ist Maurice Chammah presages the death of America’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tem. Chammah expert­ly weaves togeth­er sys­temic issues with indi­vid­ual, human­iz­ing case details to illus­trate the efforts of lawyers, orga­ni­za­tions, and activists who are chal­leng­ing the foun­da­tions of the sys­tem with the goal of abol­ish­ing the death penal­ty. The New York Times called it ​“a case…