Download or read book Murder and the Death Penalty in Massachusetts written by Alan Rogers and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than 300 years Massachusetts executed men and women convicted of murder. This book offers an account of how the efforts of reformers and abolitionists and the Supreme Judicial Court's commitment to the rule of law ultimately converged to end the death penalty in Massachusetts.

Download or read book Some Notes on Death Row and the Death Penalty in Massachusetts written by Massachusetts. Department of Correction and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ... Statistics on disposition of men sentenced to death since 1898; data on men on "death row" including their previous history, age, race, etc., activity allowed them in prison, etc ...

Download or read book An Analysis of Conviction of Murder in the First Degree in Massachusetts from January 1 1900 to December 31 1962 written by William Francis Bugden and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Trial and Execution for Petit Treason of Mark and Phillis Slaves of Capt John Codman written by Abner Cheney Goodell (Jr.) and published by . This book was released on 1883 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Death Penalty written by Stuart BANNER and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The death penalty arouses our passions as does few other issues. Some view taking another person's life as just and reasonable punishment while others see it as an inhumane and barbaric act. But the intensity of feeling that capital punishment provokes often obscures its long and varied history in this country. Now, for the first time, we have a comprehensive history of the death penalty in the United States. Law professor Stuart Banner tells the story of how, over four centuries, dramatic changes have taken place in the ways capital punishment has been administered and experienced. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the penalty was standard for a laundry list of crimes--from adultery to murder, from arson to stealing horses. Hangings were public events, staged before audiences numbering in the thousands, attended by women and men, young and old, black and white alike. Early on, the gruesome spectacle had explicitly religious purposes--an event replete with sermons, confessions, and last minute penitence--to promote the salvation of both the condemned and the crowd. Through the nineteenth century, the execution became desacralized, increasingly secular and private, in response to changing mores. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, ironically, as it has become a quiet, sanitary, technological procedure, the death penalty is as divisive as ever. By recreating what it was like to be the condemned, the executioner, and the spectator, Banner moves beyond the debates, to give us an unprecedented understanding of capital punishment's many meanings. As nearly four thousand inmates are now on death row, and almost one hundred are currently being executed each year, the furious debate is unlikely to diminish. The Death Penalty is invaluable in understanding the American way of the ultimate punishment. Table of Contents: Abbreviations Introduction 1. Terror, Blood, and Repentance 2. Hanging Day 3. Degrees of Death 4. The Origins of Opposition 5. Northern Reform, Southern Retention 6. Into the Jail Yard 7. Technological Cures 8. Decline 9. To the Supreme Court 10. Resurrection Epilogue Appendix: Counting Executions Notes Acknowledgments Index Reviews of this book: [Banner] deftly balances history and politics, crafting a book that will be valuable to anyone interested in knowing more about capital punishment, no matter what his or her views are on the ethical issues surrounding the topic. --David Pitt, Booklist Reviews of this book: In this well-researched and clear account...Banner charts how and why this country went from having one of the world's mildest punitive systems to one of its harshest. --Publishers Weekly Reviews of this book: Stuart Banner's book is fine and balanced and important. His lucid history of this grim subject is scrupulously accurate...It is refreshingly free of the tendentiousness and the sensationalism that this subject invites. --Richard A. Posner, New Republic Reviews of this book: [The] contrast between the past and the present can now be seen with great clarity thanks to...Stuart Banner and his comprehensive book, The Death Penalty...American historians have been slow to undertake anything like a full-scale study of the subject...Banner's book does much to fill [the gaps]. His book is an important and comprehensive...treatment of the topic. --Hugo Adam Bedau, Boston Review Reviews of this book: Despite the gruesome nature of the book's topic, it is difficult to stop reading. Banner's research is fascinating, his writing style compelling. Given the emotional nature of the subject (few people known to me are wishy-washy about whether the death penalty is moral or immoral), Banner walks the line of neutrality skillfully, without seeming evasive. --Steve Weinberg, Legal Times Reviews of this book: Stuart Banner's The Death Penalty is a tour de force, remarkable for its neutrality as it traces the ways in which the death penalty has been applied, and for what kinds of crimes, from the Colonial era to the present. Banner...writes like a historian who believes perspective is best gained by dispassionately setting out what happened and letting everyone come to his or her own conclusions. I think, in this book, that works wonderfully. On a subject in which emotions run so high, it seems awfully useful to have a dispassionate voice. After all, if Banner allowed his own feelings on the death penalty--pro, con or somewhere in the middle--to be known, the book easily could be dismissed as a diatribe. He doesn't, and it can't. --Judith Neuman Beck, San Jose Mercury News Reviews of this book: Law professor Banner...offers a persuasive examination of the evolution of capital punishment from Colonial times onward. He makes clear that the death penalty has possessed generally consistent support from the US populace, although changes in the sensibilities of juries, executioners, legal theoreticians, and judges have occurred...Highly recommended. --R. C. Cottrell, Choice Reviews of this book: Stuart Banner aptly illustrates in The Death Penalty, like the nation, the death penalty has changed with the times...Banner's account spotlights a number of interesting trends in American history...Mostly evenhanded in the tour he provides through the history of the death penalty and its role in and reflection of American society, he has managed to provide an accessible look at what is a profoundly controversial and complicated subject. --Steven Martinovich, Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel Reviews of this book: "For centuries," Stuart Banner tells us, "Americans had been proud to possess a criminal-justice system that made less use of the death penalty than just about any other place on the globe, including the countries of western Europe." But no longer. Now we possess "one of the harshest criminal codes in the world." The Death Penalty helps explain that turnaround, but only in the course of a complicated story in which different factors emerge at different times to play often unforeseeable roles...[This is a] superbly told history. --Paul Rosenberg, Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News Reviews of this book: Stuart Banner's lucid, richly researched book brings us, for the first time, a comprehensive history of American capital punishment from colonial times to the present. He describes the practices that characterized the institution at different periods, elucidates their ritual purposes and social meanings, and identifies the forces that led to their transformation. The book's well-ordered narrative is interspersed with individual case histories, that give flesh and blood to the account. --David Garland, Times Literary Supplement Reviews of this book: [An] informative, even-handed, chillingly fascinating account of why and how the U.S. government and many state governments decided to sponsor executions of criminals--even though innocent defendants might die, too. --Jane Henderson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Reviews of this book: Stuart Banner's The Death Penalty is a splendidly objective achievement. Delightfully written, free of academic pretense, liberally sprinkled with apt references from contemporary sources, the book exhaustively explores the multifaceted evolution of America's penal practices. --Elsbeth Bothe, Baltimore Sun The Death Penalty is certain to be the definitive account of the American experience with capital punishment, from its beginnings in the seventeenth century, to the execution of Timothy McVeigh in 2001. This is a first rate piece of scholarship: well written, deeply researched, fascinating to read, and full of insights and good common sense. It is, in my view, one of the finest books to deal with this troubled and troubling subject. Historical and legal scholarship owe a debt of gratitude to Stuart Banner. --Lawrence Friedman, Stanford Law School A masterful book. This is a long overdue account which fills a huge gap in our understanding of America's long and complex relationship to state killing. With meticulous scholarship and lucid prose, Banner has written a compelling account of the place of capital punishment in our society. It sets the standard for all future scholarship on the history of the death penalty in America. --Austin Sarat, author of When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition The Death Penalty, a study we have badly needed, is the first history of the nation's engagement--as well as its disengagement--with capital punishment from the country's earliest days to the present. With a sure grasp of the constitutional issues, Stuart Banner greatly advances a conversation at last underway about the rightness of putting people to death for having inflicted a death. Banner's greatest and most useful feat is remaining dispassionate on a subject that he cares deeply about--as do a growing number of his fellow Americans. --William S. McFeely, author of Proximity to Death The Death Penalty beautifully explains the changing paths traveled by supporters and opponents of capital punishment over the years. It explores a subject of enormous symbolic importance to Americans today, linking our views about the death penalty to our larger concerns about crime. --David Oshinsky, author of "Worse Than Slavery": Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice Banner's book is a superbly detailed and textured social history of a subject too often treated in legal abstractions. It demonstrates how capital punishment has gnawed at the conscience and imagination of Americans, and how it has challenged their efforts to define themselves culturally, politically, and racially. --Robert Weisberg, Stanford Law School

Download or read book A Review of Murder Convictions in Massachusetts in this Century written by and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Innocent Men Can be Executed The Cero Gangi Case of Massachusetts written by American League to Abolish Capital Punishment and published by . This book was released on 1930 with total page 12 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Hanging Judge written by Michael Ponsor and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-12-03 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of The One-Eyed Judge: A New York Times–bestselling novel about a federal death penalty trial from the perspective of the presiding judge. When a drive-by shooting in Holyoke, Massachusetts, claims the lives of a drug dealer and a hockey mom volunteering at an inner-city clinic, the police arrest a rival gang member. With no death penalty in Massachusetts, the US attorney shifts the double homicide out of state jurisdiction into federal court so he can seek a death sentence. The Honorable David S. Norcross, a federal judge with only two years on the bench, now presides over the first death penalty case in the state in decades. He must referee the clash between an ambitious female prosecutor and a brilliant veteran defense attorney in a high-stress environment of community outrage, media pressure, vengeful gang members, and a romantic entanglement that threatens to capsize his trial—not to mention the most dangerous force of all: the unexpected. Written by judge Michael Ponsor, who presided over Massachusetts’s first capital case in over fifty years, The Hanging Judge explores the controversial issue of capital punishment in a dramatic and thought-provoking way that will keep you on the edge of your seat. It is “a crackling court procedural” (Anita Shreve) and “gripping legal thriller” (Booklist) perfect for fans of Scott Turow.

Download or read book Final Report written by Massachusetts. Governor's Council on Capital Punishment and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ..."We, the members of the Massachusetts Governor's Council on Capital Punishment, hereby submit our final report and recomendations to Governor Mitt Romney. In this report, we offer a series of ten proposals - many of which are unprecedented in the history of American capital punishment - that, if adopted in their entirety, can allow creation of a fair capital punishment statute for Massachusetts that is as narrowly tailored, and as infallible, as humanly possible."; presents the 10 recommendation in great detail; also includes a list of Council members...

Download or read book Deterrence and the Death Penalty written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2012-05-26 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many studies during the past few decades have sought to determine whether the death penalty has any deterrent effect on homicide rates. Researchers have reached widely varying, even contradictory, conclusions. Some studies have concluded that the threat of capital punishment deters murders, saving large numbers of lives; other studies have concluded that executions actually increase homicides; still others, that executions have no effect on murder rates. Commentary among researchers, advocates, and policymakers on the scientific validity of the findings has sometimes been acrimonious. Against this backdrop, the National Research Council report Deterrence and the Death Penalty assesses whether the available evidence provides a scientific basis for answering questions of if and how the death penalty affects homicide rates. This new report from the Committee on Law and Justice concludes that research to date on the effect of capital punishment on homicide rates is not useful in determining whether the death penalty increases, decreases, or has no effect on these rates. The key question is whether capital punishment is less or more effective as a deterrent than alternative punishments, such as a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Yet none of the research that has been done accounted for the possible effect of noncapital punishments on homicide rates. The report recommends new avenues of research that may provide broader insight into any deterrent effects from both capital and noncapital punishments.

Download or read book Crime and Capital Punishment written by Arnold Barnett and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2015-06-16 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Crime and Capital Punishment: Some Recent Studies In November, 1976, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, arguably the most liberal state in the nation, put a gun-control proposition on its ballot. The proposal was defeated by what Newsweek called "a stunning 3-1 margin." Presumably a question on the same ballot about restoring the death penalty would not have fared so badly, for a capital punishment bill had sailed through the Massachusetts Legislature, which failed later by only one vote to override the Governor's veto. In December, 1976, New Jersey became the 35th state since 1972 to pass new laws that provided capital sanctions in certain homicide cases. The events in Massachusetts and the rest of the nation make clear that, rightly or wrongly, the restoration of capital punishment has become the linchpin of the American people's response to the doubling of murder rates in the last decade. Gun control measures, attempts to reduce media violence, and more general social and economic reforms have been accorded a much lower priority in the national consensus. It seems probable that, first erratically, then more regularly, executions will take place in America throughout the forseeable future. It seems fair to say that America's historical experience with the death penalty - which includes thousands of executions earlier this century - has had minimal net impact on the evolving national decision to restore capital punishment. The Supreme Court, for example, in its 1976 decision authorizing the resumption of executions, stressed that it had reached no conclusions on whether past executions had served to deter murders. It would be one thing if this situation arose because those who had studied past murder and execution data found them inherently inconclusive on deterrence questions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Download or read book Crime and Punishment in Early Massachusetts 1620 1692 written by Edwin Powers and published by Boston : Beacon Press. This book was released on 1966 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When Deborah Wilson walked through the streets of Salem in 1662 'naked as the day she came into the world, ' her intention was to dramatize the 'nakedness' of Puritan religious thinking. She succeeded only in getting herself 'well whipped' and becoming one of the fascinating human illustrations in [this] informing and engrossing study of crime and its punishment in the early days of Colonial Massachusetts. She was indeed fortunate not to have become one of the grimmer statistics of the time--for the Puritans, in their pursuit of 'Godly justice, ' hanged five Quakers on Boston Common. The story of the 'saints' who founded this 'New England Utopia' has often been told. For the first time, here, is the story of the sinners--in all the vivid, sparkling 17th century prose in which the Saints preserved it. It is a particularly important story since the justice they evolved and dispensed in the Plymouth and Bay colonies from 1620 to 1692 profoundly affected many aspects of criminal justice in America. These 'first beginners, ' as they styled themselves, left a lasting imprint on the laws which govern us today ... This scholarly and absorbing study gives the background of the settlement of these two colonies to show the extent of the legal knowledge and experience of the founders. A concise analysis of the legal system they established follows, and then an account of the changes and developments that took place. All aspects of the law--the lawyers, judges, lawmakers, policemen, criminals, courts, jails, and prisons--are fully considered. The forms of punishment and their frequency are examined. The author has compiled valuable tables of the occurrences of different crimes and their penalties. There is also a comprehensive treatment of the relationship of church and state, and of the civil rights and liberties of the colonists ... What makes this work especially useful to the student as well as the general reader are the concluding sections of each chapter. In short historical summaries, the author brings the subject of each chapter up to date. Thus this is history which not only illuminates the past, but also is directly relevant to the problems and concerns of today"--

Download or read book Legal Executions in New England written by Daniel Allen Hearn and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-08-13 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1623 and 1960 (the date of the last execution as of 1999), Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont legally put to death more than 700 men and women for a wide variety of capital crimes ranging from army desertion to murder. This is a companion volume to Legal Executions in New York State and Legal Executions in New Jersey, both published by McFarland. It is comprised of chronologically arranged biographical entries for the executed persons. Each entry gives personal data on the executed person, including age, ethnicity, and gender, as well as a detailed account of the crime for which he or she was sentenced to death and information on the place and method of execution. Fully indexed.

Download or read book Reports on the Abolition of Capital Punishment written by Massachusetts. General Court. House of Representatives. Committee on Capital Punishment and published by . This book was released on 1837 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Massachusetts General Laws Annotated Under Arrangement of the Official General Laws of Massachusetts written by Massachusetts. Laws, statutes, etc and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 812 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Capital Punishment written by and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Report Relating to Capital Punishment written by Massachusetts. General Court. House of Representatives. Committee on Capital Punishment and published by . This book was released on 1836 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An early attempt to ban the death penalty; the report of a committee convened at the recommendation of Governor Edward Everett and chaired by the anti-capital punishment activist Robert Rantoul.