Books

A new book,​“In this Timeless Time: Living and Dying on Death Row in America,” authors Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian explore the life of death row inmates in Texas and in oth­er states. Jackson and Christian cap­ture, through words and pic­tures, the dai­ly expe­ri­ences of inmates while also high­light­ing arbi­trary judi­cial process­es relat­ed to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, said,…

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Raymond Bonner’s new book, Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong, is about to be pub­lished and was not­ed ear­li­er by DPIC. An excerpt from the book appeared recent­ly in The Atlantic. Andrew Cohen, also writ­ing in The Atlantic, called it​“the book of the cen­tu­ry about the death penal­ty.” Cohen com­ment­ed that​“Bonner’s book comes at a cru­cial time in the mod­ern his­to­ry of the death penal­ty. It comes at a time…

(Winner: Silver Medal in the U.S. History cat­e­go­ry in the Independent Publisher Book Awards). A new book by Professor John D. Bessler, titled Cruel and Unusual: The American Death Penalty and the Founders’ Eighth Amendment, chal­lenges the con­ven­tion­al wis­dom that the coun­try’s founders were avid death penal­ty sup­port­ers, and explores their var­i­ous views on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Prof. Bessler dis­cuss­es how the…

The fourth edi­tion of Robert Bohm’s​“Deathquest: An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Capital Punishment in the United States,” is now avail­able through Anderson Publishing. The new edi­tion is updat­ed with dis­cus­sion of the lat­est research on the effec­tive­ness of the death penal­ty, the poten­tial for dis­crim­i­na­to­ry appli­ca­tion, costs, and new data on mis­car­riages of jus­tice, pub­lic opin­ion, and the influ­ences of reli­gion. This textbook…

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…

A new book by Pulitzer Prize-win­n­ing jour­nal­ist Raymond Bonner, Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong, inves­ti­gates the short­com­ings of the jus­tice sys­tem in the case of Edward Lee Elmore, a black man sen­tenced to death in South Carolina in 1982. Elmore, who was semi-lit­er­ate with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ties, was sent to death row for the mur­der and sex­u­al assault of a white woman, even though there was…

A forth­com­ing book by John D. Bessler,​“Cruel and Unusual: The American Death Penalty and the Founders’ Eighth Amendment,” dis­cuss­es the his­to­ry of the Eighth Amendment and the coun­try’s founders’ views on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. While the con­ven­tion­al wis­dom is that the founders were avid death penal­ty sup­port­ers, Bessler’s exam­i­na­tion shows they had con­flict­ing and ambiva­lent views on the sub­ject. Bessler ana­lyzes the U.S. Supreme Court’s…

Professor Robert M. Bohm has pub­lished a new book on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, The Ultimate Sanction: Understanding the Death Penalty Through Its Many Voices and Many Sides. The book looks at the death penal­ty through inter­views with peo­ple affect­ed by the sys­tem in dif­fer­ent ways.​“We must,” Bohm writes,​“begin to under­stand the reach of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment beyond just the vic­tim and the per­pe­tra­tor.” To that end, he includes perspectives from…

A new nov­el by Dax-Devlon Ross, Make Me Believe: A Crime Novel Based on Real Events, fol­lows the dis­cov­er­ies and dan­ger­ous encoun­ters of a fic­tion­al author inves­ti­gat­ing the case of Toronto Patterson, the last juve­nile defen­dant exe­cut­ed in Texas before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down this prac­tice in 2005. Employing actu­al inter­views with Patterson, court doc­u­ments, news arti­cles and court­room tes­ti­mo­ny, Ross’s book blends fact and…