Books

Katherine Norgard’s recent book, ​“Hard to Place: A Crime of Alcohol,” is a per­son­al account of the trau­ma expe­ri­enced by her fam­i­ly when her adopt­ed son is charged with a cap­i­tal crime. The book is the author’s sto­ry of fight­ing to save her son after he was sen­tenced to death for the 1989 mur­der of an elder­ly cou­ple in Tuscon, Arizona. At the time of his tri­al, she still did not know that her son, John Eastlack, had been born with fetal alco­hol syn­drome, despite his signs of mental…

“A Meal to Die For” is a short sto­ry by Professor Robert Johnson exam­in­ing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment through the eyes of a man approach­ing his exe­cu­tion. The sto­ry is part of The Crying Wall and Other Prison Stories, a larg­er col­lec­tion of short sto­ries by a vari­ety of authors. In ​“A Meal to Die For,” Johnson weaves the death row pris­on­er’s last meal with the grad­ual process of lethal injec­tion, result­ing in a painful death. Robert Johnson is a Professor of Justice,…

A new book by Michael Meltsner, The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer, pro­vides a per­son­al his­to­ry of the civ­il rights move­ment from the per­spec­tive of an attor­ney com­mit­ted to social change. Meltsner’s writ­ings bring to life a sem­i­nal peri­od of legal reform in U.S. his­to­ry. The book dis­cuss­es famous cas­es and the turn­ing points in the civ­il rights and death penal­ty move­ments. Stephen Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights notes, ​“Michael Meltsner has per­formed a great public…

Wounds That Do Not Bind: Victim-based Perspectives on the Death Penalty, a new book by James R. Acker and David Reed Karp, exam­ines how fam­i­ly mem­bers and advo­cates for vic­tims address the impact of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. The book presents the per­son­al sto­ries of vic­tims’ fam­i­ly mem­bers and their inter­ac­tions with the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. It also exam­ines the rel­e­vant areas of legal research, includ­ing the use of vic­tim impact evi­dence in cap­i­tal tri­als, how capital punishment…

In his new book, Death by Design: Capital Punishment as a Social Psychological System, Craig Haney argues that cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, and par­tic­u­lar­ly the events that lead to death sen­tenc­ing itself, are main­tained through a sys­tem that dis­tances and dis­en­gages peo­ple from the true nature of the task. Haney, a pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, relies on his own research and that oth­er of oth­er sci­en­tists in approach­ing the ques­tion, ​“How can normal,…

Truth Be Told: Life Lessons From Death Row fea­tures cor­re­spon­dence between Agnes Vadas and Richard Nields, who is on death row in Ohio. The book con­tains let­ters exchanged between the two over six years. They dis­cuss a wide range of top­ics, includ­ing life on death row, how they have coped with chal­lenges in life, and the lessons they have learned from hard­ship. Agnes Vadas is a musi­cian and human rights activist from Washington. (AuthorHouse, 2005). See…

Capital Consequences: Families of the Condemned Tell Their Stories is a new book by Rachel King of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project. The book focus­es on the impact that the death penal­ty has on the fam­i­lies of those who have been con­demned to die. King, who also wrote Don’t Kill in Our Names: Families of Murder Victims Speak Out Against the Death Penalty, describes these indi­vid­u­als as the unseen vic­tims of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and high­lights the expe­ri­ence of hav­ing loved ones on death…

“Hidden Victims,” a new book by soci­ol­o­gist Susan F. Sharp of the University of Oklahoma, exam­ines the impact of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment on the fam­i­lies of those fac­ing exe­cu­tion. Through a series of in-depth inter­views with fam­i­lies of the accused, Sharp illus­trates from a soci­o­log­i­cal stand­point how fam­i­ly mem­bers and friends of those on death row are, in effect, indi­rect vic­tims of the ini­tial crime. The book empha­sizes their respons­es to sen­tenc­ing, as well as how they grieve and face an…

Rob Warden, Executive Director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, has writ­ten a book about one of the first accounts of a death penal­ty exon­er­a­tion in the U.S. Wilkie Collins, a British author, had writ­ten a nov­el enti­tled ​“The Dead Alive” about the con­vic­tions and death sen­tences of Jesse and Stephen Boorn for a mur­der com­mit­ted in 1819. They were lat­er exon­er­at­ed. Warden’s book is enti­tled ​“Wilkie Collins’s The Dead Alive: The Novel, the Case,…