Books

The Ride: A Shocking Murder and a Bereaved Father’s Journey from Rage to Redemption is a new book by Brian MacQuarrie that explores a par­en­t’s grief and sub­se­quent trans­for­ma­tion through the sto­ry of Robert Curley in Massachusetts. Curley’s 10-year-old son, Jeffrey, was a vic­tim of abduc­tion and mur­der in 1997. The mur­der shocked and out­raged the com­mu­ni­ty of East Cambridge out­side of Boston. MacQuarrie explores the father’s evo­lu­tion ​“from grief to anger to activism against preda­tors,” and from being an out­raged father demand­ing the death penal­ty for his son’s murderer…

A new book, No Winners Here Tonight: Race, Politics, and Geography in One of the Country’s Busiest Death Penalty States, by Ohio jour­nal­ist Andrew Welsh-Huggins, explores the his­to­ry of Ohio’s death penal­ty and rais­es ques­tions of fair­ness by exam­in­ing the state’s expe­ri­ence with cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Citing his­tor­i­cal exam­ples, the author argues that the death penal­ty has been car­ried out in an arbi­trary fash­ion from its ear­li­est days and has fall­en short of the state’s stan­dard of exe­cut­ing only the ​“worst of the worst.” This book is the first com­pre­hen­sive study…

Bestselling author Thomas Cahill has writ­ten a new book, ​“A Saint on Death Row: The Story of Dominique Green,” about his encounter and grad­ual under­stand­ing of the life of a Texas death row inmate named Dominique Green. Green, who was only 18 at the time of his arrest, was exe­cut­ed in 2004. Cahill’s sto­ry of Green’s life high­lights issues of race, pover­ty, and abuse, trac­ing details of his child­hood through his years on death row. Thomas Cahill is prob­a­bly best known for his New York Times best­seller ​“How the Irish…

A new book on inter­na­tion­al devel­op­ments in cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, The Next Frontier: National Development, Political Change, and the Death Penalty in Asia, is now avail­able from Oxford University Press. Authors David Johnson, an expert on law and soci­ety in Asia, and Franklin Zimring, a senior author­i­ty on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, uti­lize their research to iden­ti­fy the crit­i­cal fac­tors affect­ing the future of the death penal­ty in Asia. They found that when an author­i­tar­i­an state expe­ri­enced demo­c­ra­t­ic reform, such as in Taiwan and South Korea, the rate of exe­cu­tions dropped sharply. Johnson…

Life and Death Matters: Seeking the Truth About Capital Punishment is a new book that doc­u­ments author Robert Baldwin’s per­son­al jour­ney in con­fronting racism and the death penal­ty in the Deep South. Baldwin shares his evo­lu­tion in a con­ver­sa­tion­al, first-per­son style with a declared faith per­spec­tive. Written for peo­ple of all beliefs and back­grounds, he focus­es on the myths and mis­con­cep­tions about pris­ons and the death penal­ty dis­cov­ered through his per­son­al experiences.

The Future of America’s Death Penalty, edit­ed by Charles S. Lanier, William J. Bowers, James R. Acker, is a new book com­prised of orig­i­nal chap­ters authored by nation­al­ly dis­tin­guished schol­ars. It is an ambi­tious effort to iden­ti­fy the most crit­i­cal issues con­fronting the future of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the United States and the steps that must be tak­en to gath­er and ana­lyze the infor­ma­tion that will be nec­es­sary for informed pol­i­cy judg­ments. Contributors artic­u­late the most press­ing issues of admin­is­tra­tion, lit­i­ga­tion, leg­is­la­tion, and exec­u­tive action con­fronting the future of capital…

Mark Osler, a for­mer fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tor and present fac­ul­ty mem­ber at a con­ser­v­a­tive Christian law school in Texas, has written Jesus on Death Row: The Trial of Jesus and American Capital Punishment.