Books

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. Maurice Chammah’s article, We Saw Monsters. She Saw Humans, marks the July 12, 2017 passing of mitigation pioneer Scharlette Holdman and tells the story of her forty-year fight on behalf of capital defendants and death-row prisoners. The forthcoming…

When University of Colorado Boulder sociology professor Michael Radelet began doing research on the death penalty in the 1970s, the noted death-penalty scholar tells Colorado Public Radio, he didn’t have an opinion about capital punishment and “didn’t know anything about it.” After researching issues of race, innocence, and the death penalty, he came to have grave reservations. “I believe the death penalty is about making god-like decisions without god-like accuracy,” he told Colorado Matters…

Exonerated: A History of the Innocence Movement, by Robert J. Norris, describes the rise of the “innocence movement,” the lawyers, investigators, journalists, lawmakers, and organizations that have worked to uncover wrongful convictions, educate the public about the problem, and reform the criminal justice system to prevent future mistakes. For the book, Norris interviewed 37 key leaders on the issue, including Innocence Project co-founders Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, and Rob Warden…

Walter Ogrod was convicted and sentenced to death in Philadelphia in 1996 for the 1988 murder of a 4‑year-old girl, whose body was found in a discarded television box. Ogrod, who is developmentally disabled, has long maintained his innocence, but despite significant irregularities in the case and amidst allegations of official misconduct, local prosecutors have fought efforts to obtain DNA testing of the physical evidence and to investigate the role a discredited prison informant played in…

In his newest book, The Death Penalty As Torture: From the Dark Ages to Abolition, John Bessler chronicles the historical link between torture and the death penalty from the Middle Ages to the present day and argues that both are medieval relics. The book, released on February 17, 2017, asserts that capital punishment is itself a form of torture, despite modern legal distinctions that outlaw torture while permitting death sentences and executions. Bessler draws on the writings of philosophers…

In 1986, California voters removed Rose Bird, the state’s first female supreme court chief justice, from office after conservative groups spent more than $10 million in a recall effort that portrayed her as “soft on crime,” emphasizing her court opinions overturning death sentences that had been unconstitutionally imposed. Ten years later, Tennessee Supreme Court Justice Penny White lost a retention election after death penalty proponents and other conservative groups targeted her for voting…

Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment by Harvard Law Professor Carol S. Steiker and University of Texas Law Professor Jordan M. Steiker examines the U.S. Supreme Court’s “extensive — and ultimately failed — effort to reform and rationalize the practice of capital punishment in the United States through top-down, constitutional regulation.” The authors argue that significant constitutional flaws persist in the death penalty system despite the Court’s attempts to regulate it, and…

In a new book, Against the Death Penalty, Professor John Bessler of the University of Baltimore School of Law presents Justice Stephen Breyer’s historic dissent in Glossip v. Gross, which questioned the continuing constitutionality of capital punishment in the United States, in a new format intended to make the opinion more accessible to a broad audience. “I tried to contextualize the opinion by doing a longer introduction which makes the opinion into a book and summarize what the other…

In a landmark ruling in McCleskey v. Kemp in 1987, a bitterly divided U.S. Supreme Court voted 5 – 4 vote that statistical evidence of racial discrimination in the application of the death penalty was insufficient to overturn an individual death sentence. A new book, Race and the Death Penalty: The Legacy of McCleskey v. Kemp, edited by David P. Keys, associate professor of criminal justice at New Mexico State University and R.J. Maratea of the Youth Research and Resource Center, Inc. explores…

In his new book, Executing Grace, evangelical Christian speaker, activist, and author Shane Claiborne weaves together personal narratives, theology, and research to make a Christian case against the death penalty. Claiborne says “[t]he death penalty did not flourish in America in spite of Christians but because of us.” Arguing that “[w]e can’t make death penalty history until we make death penalty personal,” he tells the stories of people affected by the death penalty in a variety of ways…