Download or read book The Changing Attitude Towards the Death Penalty in the US written by Magdalena Öttl and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2020-11-20 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pre-University Paper from the year 2016 in the subject Law - Penology, grade: 1, , language: English, abstract: The aim of this paper is to describe to what extend the public opinion about capital punishment in the United States has changed and to outline the reasons for that. Based on the hypothesis that support has generally dropped, this paper provides an overview why and when support slowly started to decrease. The examinations are limited to approximately the last twenty-five years, and the three main chapters are structured according to the time periods of the then-ruling presidents. They respectively comprise information about the president’s death penalty policy, the changes in law, some incidents that have occurred, as well as the development in people’s attitude. Consequently, it can be concluded that more and more Americans oppose the death penalty as the system’s fallibility and inefficiency are becoming obvious. However, while moral positions have not changed significantly, the impossible flawlessness and expensive application of the death penalty triggered many shifts in opinion.
Download or read book Changing Attitudes Towards the Death Penalty written by Zoltan J. Toth and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-06-11 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the pros and cons of the death penalty and the history of capital punishment. In this context, it puts a special emphasis on the situation in Hungary, where, amongst its neighbors, in recent years the demand for the reestablishment of the death penalty has received the strongest political support from many pro-government politicians. Toth presents tendencies toward abolition of the death penalty and analyzes the arguments by which the death penalty can, in principle, be criticized or even defended. The book presents the main issues of the death penalty, arguments of both abolitionists and retentionists, and reviews the modern history of this sanction. It does not seek to convince the reader of the correctness or wrongness of the death penalty, but it presents both sides of the argument and their standpoints, and leaves the reader to decide. It encourages informed debate and discussion.
Download or read book The Death Penalty in America written by Hugo Adam Bedau and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1982 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of capital punishment issues, including American attitudes, deterence problems, and discussions for and against the death penalty.
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 The Death Penalty in America written by Hugo Adam Bedau and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998-05-28 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: InThe Death Penalty in America: Current Controversies, Hugo Adam Bedau, one of our preeminent scholars on the subject,provides a comprehensive sourcebook on the death penalty, making the process of informed consideration not only possible but fascinating as well. No mere revision of the third edition of The Death Penalty in America--which the New York Times praised as "the most complete, well-edited and comprehensive collection of readings on the pros and cons of the death penalty"--this volume brings together an entirely new selection of 40 essays and includes updated statistical and research data, recent Supreme Court decisions, and the best current contributions to the debate over capital punishment. From the status of the death penalty worldwide to current attitudes of Americans toward convicted killers, from legal arguments challenging the constitutionality of the death penalty to moral arguments enlisting the New Testament in support of it, from controversies over the role of race and class in the judicial system to proposals to televise executions, Bedau gathers readings that explore all the most compelling aspects of this most compelling issue.
Download or read book The Death Penalty written by Ernest Van den Haag and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-29 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1965 until 1980, there was a virtual moratorium on executions for capital offenses in the United States. This was due primarily to protracted legal proceedings challenging the death penalty on constitutional grounds. After much Sturm und Drang, the Supreme Court of the United States, by a divided vote, finally decided that "the death penalty does not invariably violate the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause of the Eighth Amendment." The Court's decisions, however, do not moot the controversy about the death penalty or render this excellent book irrelevant. The ball is now in the court of the Legislature and the Executive. Leg islatures, federal and state, can impose or abolish the death penalty, within the guidelines prescribed by the Supreme Court. A Chief Executive can commute a death sentence. And even the Supreme Court can change its mind, as it has done on many occasions and did, with respect to various aspects of the death penalty itself, durlog the moratorium period. Also, the people can change their minds. Some time ago, a majority, according to reliable polls, favored abolition. Today, a substantial majority favors imposition of the death penalty. The pendulum can swing again, as it has done in the past.
Download or read book The Death of the American Death Penalty written by Larry Wayne Koch and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2012 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The death penalty has largely disappeared as a national legislative issue and the Supreme Court has mainly bowed out, leaving the states at the cutting edge of abolition politics. This essential guide presents and explains the changing political and cultural challenges to capital punishment at the state level. As with their previous volume, America Without the Death Penalty (Northeastern, 2002), the authors of this completely new volume concentrate on the local and regional relationships between death penalty abolition and numerous empirical factors, such as economic conditions; public sentiment; the roles of social, political, and economic elites; the mass media; and population diversity. They highlight the recent abolition of the practice in New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Illinois; the near misses in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maryland, and Nebraska; the Kansas rollercoaster rides; and the surprising recent decline of the death penalty even in the deep South. Abolition of the death penalty in the United States is a piecemeal process, with one state after another peeling off from the pack until none is left and the tragic institution finally is no more. This book tells you how, and why, that will likely happen.
Download or read book The Death Penalty in the Nineties written by Welsh S. White and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An up-to-date examination of legal changes and shifting attitudes surrounding capital punishment
Download or read book Let the Lord Sort Them written by Maurice Chammah and published by Crown. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A deeply reported, searingly honest portrait of the death penalty in Texas—and what it tells us about crime and punishment in America “If you’re one of those people who despair that nothing changes, and dream that something can, this is a story of how it does.”—Anand Giridharadas, The New York Times Book Review WINNER OF THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS AWARD In 1972, the United States Supreme Court made a surprising ruling: the country’s death penalty system violated the Constitution. The backlash was swift, especially in Texas, where executions were considered part of the cultural fabric, and a dark history of lynching was masked by gauzy visions of a tough-on-crime frontier. When executions resumed, Texas quickly became the nationwide leader in carrying out the punishment. Then, amid a larger wave of criminal justice reform, came the death penalty’s decline, a trend so durable that even in Texas the punishment appears again close to extinction. In Let the Lord Sort Them, Maurice Chammah charts the rise and fall of capital punishment through the eyes of those it touched. We meet Elsa Alcala, the orphaned daughter of a Mexican American family who found her calling as a prosecutor in the nation’s death penalty capital, before becoming a judge on the state’s highest court. We meet Danalynn Recer, a lawyer who became obsessively devoted to unearthing the life stories of men who committed terrible crimes, and fought for mercy in courtrooms across the state. We meet death row prisoners—many of them once-famous figures like Henry Lee Lucas, Gary Graham, and Karla Faye Tucker—along with their families and the families of their victims. And we meet the executioners, who struggle openly with what society has asked them to do. In tracing these interconnected lives against the rise of mass incarceration in Texas and the country as a whole, Chammah explores what the persistence of the death penalty tells us about forgiveness and retribution, fairness and justice, history and myth. Written with intimacy and grace, Let the Lord Sort Them is the definitive portrait of a particularly American institution.
Download or read book Executing Freedom written by Daniel LaChance and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-11-18 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mid-1990s, as public trust in big government was near an all-time low, 80% of Americans told Gallup that they supported the death penalty. Why did people who didn't trust government to regulate the economy or provide daily services nonetheless believe that it should have the power to put its citizens to death? That question is at the heart of this text - a powerful, wide-ranging examination of the place of the death penalty in American culture and how it has changed over the years. Drawing on an array of sources, Daniel LaChance shows how attitudes toward the death penalty have reflected broader shifts in Americans' thinking about the relationship between the individual and the state.
Download or read book The Innocence Issue and Changing Attitudes Toward the Death Penalty written by Rose T. Kelly and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examined the influence of different types of information about innocent people and racial bias and how that information influences attitudes toward the death penalty and a death penalty moratorium. In this study, the information types focused on racial bias in sentencing and DNA evidence proving innocence. Based on the Marshall Hypothesis which states that fully informed individuals would not support the death penalty, findings revealed that some types of information had more influence in changing attitudes than others. The purpose was to show how grassroots organizations may be able to gain more support for their causes by offering their constituents particular types of information.
Download or read book Invitation to an Execution written by Gordon Morris Bakken and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 2010-11-16 with total page 694 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until the early twentieth century, printed invitations to executions issued by lawmen were a vital part of the ritual of death concluding a criminal proceeding in the United States. In this study, Gordon Morris Bakken invites readers to an understanding of the death penalty in America with a collection of essays that trace the history and politics of this highly charged moral, legal, and cultural issue. Bakken has solicited essays from historians, political scientists, and lawyers to ensure a broad treatment of the evolution of American cultural attitudes about crime and capital punishment. Part one of this extensive analysis focuses on politics, legal history, multicultural issues, and the international aspects of the death penalty. Part two offers a regional analysis with essays that put death penalty issues into a geographic and cultural context. Part three focuses on specific states with emphasis on the need to understand capital punishment in terms of state law development, particularly because states determine on whom the death penalty will be imposed. Part four examines the various means of death, from hanging to lethal injection, in state law case studies. And finally, part five focuses on the portrayal of capital punishment in popular culture.
Download or read book The Death Penalty in the United States written by Louis J. Palmer, Jr. and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2013-10-23 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The death penalty landscape has changed considerably since the 1998 first edition of this book. For example, six states that had the death penalty--Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico and New York--no longer impose the punishment. Some of the changes set out in this second edition involve discussions of all of the significant cases decided by the United States Supreme Court after 1998, including Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005); Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002); Schriro v. Smith, 126 S.Ct. 7 (2005); Harbison v. Bell, 129 S.Ct. 1481 (2009); Holmes v. South Carolina, 126 S.Ct. 1727 (2006); Kansas v. Marsh, 126 S.Ct. 2516 (2006); Ring v. Arizona, 536 U.S. 584 (2002); Sattazahn v. Pennsylvania, 537 U.S. 101 (2003). This new edition includes 13 new chapters. They cover such topics as capital felon's defense team; habeas corpus, coram nobis and section 1983 proceedings; the Innocence protection act and post-conviction DNA testing; challenging the death sentence under racial justice acts; inhabited American territories; and the costs of capital punishment.
Download or read book Debating the Death Penalty written by Hugo Adam Bedau and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-03-24 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experts on both side of the issue speak out both for and against capital punishment and the rationale behind their individual beliefs.
Download or read book Peculiar Institution written by David Garland and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-09-30 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many Europeans, the persistence of America's death penalty is a stark reminder of American otherness. The practice of state killing is an archaic relic, a hollow symbol that accomplishes nothing but reflects a puritanical, punitive culture - bloodthirsty in its pursuit of retribution. In debating capital punishment, the usual rhetoric points to America's deviance from the western norm: civilized abolition and barbaric retention; 'us' and 'them'. This remarkable new study by a leading social thinker sweeps aside the familiar story and offers a compelling interpretation of the culture of American punishment. It shows that the same forces that led to the death penalty's abolition in Europe once made America a pioneer of reform. That democracy and civilization are not the enemies of capital punishment, though liberalism and humanitarianism are. Making sense of today's differences requires a better understanding of American society and its punishments than the standard rhetoric allows. Taking us deep inside the world of capital punishment, the book offers a detailed picture of a peculiar institution - its cultural meaning and symbolic force for supporters and abolitionists, its place in the landscape of American politics and attitudes to crime, its constitutional status and the legal struggles that define it. Understanding the death penalty requires that we understand how American society is put together - the legacy of racial violence, the structures of social power, and the commitment to radical, local majority rule. Shattering current stereotypes, the book forces us to rethink our understanding of the politics of death and of punishment in America and beyond.
Download or read book The Death Penalty written by David Lester and published by Charles C. Thomas Publisher. This book was released on 1998 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is the death penalty a deterrent? Is it applied disproportionately to certain ethnic groups? How harsh is life on death row? In this expanded new edition the author examines these and other controversial issues, draws conclusions from the current research, and discusses their implication for social policy. Topics such as capital punishment policies around the world, executions in the United States, public opinion on the death penalty, juries and the death penalty, and economic analyses of the deterrent factor all receive comprehensive coverage. Appendices round out this newly revised and updated text with studies on public attitudes toward rape and capital punishment, and the deterrent effect of executions on the homicide rate in the United States.
Download or read book Dead Wrong written by Richard A. Stack and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2006-09-30 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Attitudes toward the death penalty have changed dramatically throughout the course of history, evolving from times when public executions were occasions of solemn and pious ritual to excuses for raucous entertainment, and finally to the modern era of private, bureaucratized, mechanized, and sanitized executions that are out of sight and out of mind. Conforming thus to modern sensibilities, state-sanctioned killing is somehow more acceptable to us than public hangings would have been, because we can imagine that the inmate's death is relatively painless, and not in violation of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. This may or may not be true; Stack presents compelling arguments to the contrary. What is certain is that Dead Wrong demonstrates beyond a doubt that death row is itself a form of psychological torture and of slow, painful dehumanization. Polls indicate that 75 percent of Americans favor the death penalty—but they also show that minds change when individuals are confronted with the facts. This book was written to offer those facts-and to change those minds. The United States is alone among Western democracies in its support for capital punishment, which was only briefly abolished throughout this country between 1972 and 1976. Today, 38 states have some form of capital punishment. Yet studies show that the death penalty is not a deterrent to crime, that racial disparities in the implementation of capital punishment are rampant, and that all kinds of procedural errors, incompetent defense lawyers, and mistaken eyewitness identifications lead to an alarming number of wrongful convictions. Attitudes toward the death penalty have changed dramatically throughout the course of history, evolving from times when public executions were occasions of solemn and pious ritual to those when it was an excuse for raucous entertainment, and finally to the modern era of private, bureaucratized, mechanized, and sanitized executions conducted out of sight and out of mind. Conforming thus to modern sensibilities, state-sanctioned killing is somehow more acceptable to us than public hangings, because we can imagine that the inmate's death is relatively painless, and not in violation of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. This may or may not be true; Stack presents compelling arguments to the contrary. What is certain is that Dead Wrong demonstrates beyond a doubt that death row is itself a form of psychological torture and of slow, painful dehumanization.
