Books

The Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective by Roger Hood and Carolyn Hoyle is the Fourth Edition of a text that high­lights the lat­est devel­op­ments in the death penal­ty around the world. Roger Hood uti­lizes his expe­ri­ence as a con­sul­tant to the United Nations’ annu­al sur­vey of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in com­pil­ing a wide range of infor­ma­tion from non-gov­ern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions and aca­d­e­m­ic lit­er­a­ture. The book explores both the advances in legal chal­lenges to the death penal­ty and the reduc­tion in exe­cu­tions, while not­ing the con­tin­ued exis­tence of human rights abus­es. Problems include…

In 1982, as a sec­ond term Assemblyman, Raymond Lesniak vot­ed to rein­state the death penal­ty in New Jersey. In December 2007, New Jersey vot­ed to abol­ish the death penal­ty, becom­ing the first state in 40 years to accom­plish this. Senator Lesniak was one of the spon­sors and leg­isla­tive lead­ers of the abo­li­tion bill. He has writ­ten a new book: ​“The Road to Abolition: How New Jersey Abolished the Death Penatly.” In com­ment­ing on the book, Senator Lesniak said, ​“Why do I care so much about the mur­der­ers on death row…

Author Gilbert King, in his forth­com­ing book The Execution of Willie Francis, details the sto­ry of a young African-American man who endured the elec­tric chair twice before being exe­cut­ed for the mur­der of a white man in Louisiana. In 1946, an all-white jury con­vict­ed Francis, who was 17, and sen­tenced him to death. The first attempt to exe­cute him by elec­tro­cu­tion did not work, and Francis was returned to his death row cell where he remained for almost anoth­er year while the U.S. Supreme Court con­sid­ered whether a sec­ond electrocution…

Two new books address the death penal­ty from dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives: one ana­lyz­ing the future of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, the oth­er, by Billy Neal Moore, relates the expe­ri­ence of being on death row. Alan Clarke and Laurelyn Whitt exam­ine two fac­tors that are gain­ing impor­tance in the debate over cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. The Bitter Fruit of American Justice (Northeastern 2007) con­tends that increas­ing oppo­si­tion to the death penal­ty through­out the world could affect how oth­er coun­tries relate polit­i­cal­ly to the United States. The sec­ond influ­ence is the repeat­ed dis­cov­ery of inno­cent peo­ple on…

In The Top Ten Death Penalty Myths, pro­fes­sors Rudolph J. Gerber and John M. Johnson explore ten argu­ments used to sup­port the death penal­ty and pro­vide read­ers with cur­rent research and stud­ies chal­leng­ing these argu­ments. The authors show how ​“polit­i­cal and com­mu­ni­ty lead­ers have used myth and emo­tion­al appeals to mis­rep­re­sent the facts about cap­i­tal exe­cu­tions.” Each chap­ter begins with a state­ment in sup­port of the death penal­ty based on themes such as deter­rence, vic­tims and their fam­i­lies, and costs, and then ana­lyzes the orig­i­nal state­ment, offer­ing research to counter…