Books

In 1764, Italian philoso­pher Cesare Beccaria wrote the trea­tise, Dei delit­ti e delle pene, which author John Bessler (pic­tured) says spawned glob­al move­ments for fair and pro­por­tion­al pun­ish­ment and against prac­tices such as tor­ture and the death penal­ty. Beccaria’s book was a best-sell­er that swept across Europe and, trans­lat­ed into English in 1767 as An Essay on Crimes and Punishments, into the American colonies, shap­ing the beliefs of America’s found­ing fathers, and influ­enc­ing lead­ers, rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies, and law reformers.

The University of Virginia School of Law has cre­at­ed a new inter­ac­tive web resource (click on map) that allows researchers and the pub­lic to visu­al­ly explore death-sen­tenc­ing prac­tices in the United States from 1991 through 2017. The inter­ac­tive map pro­vides coun­ty-lev­el data on death sen­tences imposed across the United States, draw­ing from a new data­base cre­at­ed by University of Virginia Law Professor Brandon Garrett (pic­tured) for his recent book, End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice. The inter­ac­tive map, which is a web supplement…

In his new book Surviving Execution: A Miscarriage of Justice and the Fight to End the Death Penalty, Sky News reporter Ian Woods tells the sto­ry of his rela­tion­ship with con­demned Oklahoma pris­on­er Richard Glossip, whose case gained promi­nence after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review his chal­lenge to the state’s lethal-injec­tion pro­ce­dures. Although Glossip’s case is most fre­quent­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the Supreme Court’s 2015 deci­sion in Glossip v. Gross and Oklahoma’s dra­mat­ic, last-minute recis­sion of his exe­cu­tion war­rant when the state’s anony­mous drug sup­pli­er deliv­ered the wrong execution…

Anthony Ray Hinton spent thir­ty years con­fined on Alabama​’s death row for mur­ders he did not com­mit. Three years after his exon­er­a­tion and release, he has pub­lished a mem­oir of his life, The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row, that recounts sto­ries from his child­hood, the cir­cum­stances of his arrest, the trav­es­ty of his tri­al, how he sur­vived and grew on death row, and how he won his free­dom. The book, co-authored with Lara Love Hardin, has earned praise from Kirkus Review as an…

Severely restrict­ing the use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment or abol­ish­ing the death penal­ty alto­geth­er would help rec­ti­fy some of the per­sis­tent racial dis­par­i­ties found in the United States’ crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem, accord­ing to Cassia Spohn (pic­tured), the Foundation Professor of Criminology and Director of the School of Criminology & Criminal Justice at Arizona State University. In a chap­ter on Race and Sentencing Disparity in the recent­ly released Academy for Justice four-vol­ume study, Reforming Criminal Justice, Spohn — the author of How Do Judges Decide? The Search for Fairness and Justice in Punishment—writes that…

Family mem­bers of mur­der vic­tims share no sin­gle, uni­form response to the death penal­ty, but two recent pub­li­ca­tions illus­trate that a grow­ing num­ber of these fam­i­lies are now advo­cat­ing against cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. In From Death Into Life, a fea­ture arti­cle in the January 8, 2018 print edi­tion of the Jesuit mag­a­zine America, Lisa Murtha pro­files the sto­ries of how sev­er­al promi­nent vic­tim-advo­cates against the death penal­ty came to hold those views. And in a recent­ly released com­pi­la­tion of essays, Not in Our Name, nine fam­i­ly mem­bers of mur­der vic­tims share…

The Academy for Justice has recent­ly released a new four-vol­ume study, Reforming Criminal Justice, fea­tur­ing research and analy­sis by lead­ing aca­d­e­mics and a wide range of pro­pos­als for crim­i­nal jus­tice reform. The project, fund­ed with a grant from the Charles Koch Foundation and pro­duced with the sup­port of Arizona State University and ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, con­tains more than fifty chap­ters cov­er­ing a wide range of sub­jects with­in the areas of crim­i­nal­iza­tion, polic­ing, tri­al pro­ce­dures, and pun­ish­ment — includ­ing a chap­ter on Capital Punishment by renowned death-penal­ty schol­ars Professors…

In their new book, Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty, a team of researchers led by University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor Frank Baumgartner uses forty years of empir­i­cal data to assess whether the mod­ern death penal­ty avoids the defects that led the U.S. Supreme Court to declare in Furman v. Georigia (1972) that the nation’s appli­ca­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly arbi­trary and capri­cious. Their con­clu­sion: ​“A rea­soned assess­ment based on the facts sug­gests not only that the mod­ern sys­tem flunks the Furman test…

“The death penal­ty in the United States is at the end of its rope [and] its abo­li­tion will be a cat­a­lyst for reform­ing our crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem.” So argues University of Virginia Law Professor Brandon L. Garrett in his wide­ly antic­i­pat­ed new book, End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice, which ana­lyzes the rea­sons behind the steep decline in cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in over the last 25 years. With the help of oth­er researchers at the University of Virginia, Garrett ana­lyzed death-sen­tenc­ing data from 1990…

The lega­cies of Scharlette Holdman (pic­tured) and Marie Deans—two women who changed the land­scape of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the United States — are memo­ri­al­ized in a recent sto­ry in the Marshall Project and a new book sched­uled for release in August.