Against the Death Penalty

Against the Death Penalty PDF Author: Stephen Breyer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780815740568
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
"Does the Death penalty violate the Constitution? In Against the Death Penalty, Justice Stephen Breyer argues yes, it does: it is carried out unfairly and inconsistently, thus violating the ban on "cruel and unusual punishments" in the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. Against the Death Penalty contains the full text of Justice Breyer's dissent in the case of Glossip v. Gross, which involved an unsuccessful challenge to the state of Oklahoma's use of a lethal-injection drug that could cause severe pain. This volume includes an introduction to the case and a history of the challenges to the constitutionality of the death penalty by law professor John D. Bessler. Throughout Against the Death Penalty, Justice Breyer's legal citations are made accessible by Bessler's explanatory notes, but the text retains the full force of Breyer's powerful argument that the time has come for the Supreme Court to revisit the constitutionality of the death penalty. Breyer was joined in his dissent from the bench by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. This passionate argument has been cited by many legal experts including the late Justice Antonin Scalia--as signaling an eventual Court ruling striking down the death penalty."

Against the Death Penalty

Against the Death Penalty PDF Author: Stephen Breyer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780815740568
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
"Does the Death penalty violate the Constitution? In Against the Death Penalty, Justice Stephen Breyer argues yes, it does: it is carried out unfairly and inconsistently, thus violating the ban on "cruel and unusual punishments" in the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. Against the Death Penalty contains the full text of Justice Breyer's dissent in the case of Glossip v. Gross, which involved an unsuccessful challenge to the state of Oklahoma's use of a lethal-injection drug that could cause severe pain. This volume includes an introduction to the case and a history of the challenges to the constitutionality of the death penalty by law professor John D. Bessler. Throughout Against the Death Penalty, Justice Breyer's legal citations are made accessible by Bessler's explanatory notes, but the text retains the full force of Breyer's powerful argument that the time has come for the Supreme Court to revisit the constitutionality of the death penalty. Breyer was joined in his dissent from the bench by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. This passionate argument has been cited by many legal experts including the late Justice Antonin Scalia--as signaling an eventual Court ruling striking down the death penalty."

Against Capital Punishment

Against Capital Punishment PDF Author: Herbert H. Haines
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195351061
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book

Book Description
Built on in-depth interviews with movement leaders and the records of key abolitionist organizations, this work traces the struggle against capital punishment in the United States since 1972. Haines reviews the legal battles that led to the short-lived suspension of the death penalty and examines the subsequent conservative turn in the courts that has forced death penalty opponents to rely less on litigation strategies and more on political action. Employing social movement theory, he diagnoses the causes of the anti-death penalty movement's inability to mobilize widespread opposition to executions, and he makes pointed recommendations for improving its effectiveness. For this edition Haines has included a new Afterword in which he summarizes developments in the movement since 1994.

Against the Death Penalty

Against the Death Penalty PDF Author: CESARE. PELLI BECCARIA (GIUSEPPIE. BECCARIA, CESARE.)
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691211949
Category : Capital punishment
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book

Book Description
In 1764, a Milanese aristocrat named Cesare Beccaria created a sensation when he published On Crimes and Punishments. At its centre is a rejection of the death penalty as excessive, unnecessary, and pointless. Beccaria is deservedly regarded as the founding father of modern criminal law reform, yet he was not the first to argue for the abolition of the death penalty. This book presents the first English translation of the Florentine aristocrat Giuseppe Pelli's critique of capital punishment, written three years before Beccaria's treatise, but lost for more than two centuries in the Pelli family archives. The book examines the contrasting arguments of the two abolitionists, who drew from different intellectual traditions.

Let the Lord Sort Them

Let the Lord Sort Them PDF Author: Maurice Chammah
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 1524760285
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Against the Death Penalty

Against the Death Penalty PDF Author: Gardner C. Hanks
Publisher: Herald Press (VA)
ISBN: 9780836190755
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book

Book Description
Drawing on Old and New Testament resources as well as secular arguments, Gardner C. Hanks shows that the death penalty harms rather than helps any quest for a just, humane society. He demonstrates through research data that the death penalty is an ineffective crime-fighting tool.

Abolition

Abolition PDF Author: Robert Badinter
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781555536923
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book

Book Description
The English translation of a behind-the-scenes account of the abolition of the death penalty in France

13 Ways of Looking at the Death Penalty

13 Ways of Looking at the Death Penalty PDF Author: Mario Marazziti
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609805682
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book

Book Description
Nation states and communities throughout the world have reached certain decisions about capital punishment: It is the destruction of human life. It is ineffective as a deterrent for crime. It is an instrument the state uses to contain or eliminate its political adversaries. It is a tool of “justice” that disproportionality affects religious, social, and racial minorities. It is a sanction that cannot be fixed if unjustly applied. Yet the United States—along with countries notorious for human rights abuse—remains an advocate for the death penalty. In these thirteen pieces, Mario Marazziti exposes the profound inhumanity and irrationality of the death penalty in this country, and urges us to join virtually every other industrialized democracy in rendering capital punishment an abandoned practice belonging to a crueler time in human history. A polemical book, yes, yet one that brings together a wide range of stories to compel the heart as well the mind.

Don't Kill in Our Names

Don't Kill in Our Names PDF Author: Rachel King
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813531823
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book

Book Description
"Rachel King offers us the stories of families who understand the powerful reality that taking another life in the name of justice only perpetuates the tragedy. I encourage others to read these stories to better understand their journey from despair and anger to some level of peace and even forgiveness."--Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ, author of Dead Man Walking Could you forgive the murderer of your husband? Your mother? Your son? Families of murder victims are often ardent and very public supporters of the death penalty. But the people whose stories appear in this book have chosen instead to forgive their loved ones' murderers, and many have developed personal relationships with the killers and have even worked to save their lives. They have formed a nationwide group, Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation (MVFR), to oppose the death penalty. MVFR members are often treated as either saints or lunatics, but the truth is that they are neither. They are ordinary people who have responded to an extraordinary and devastating tragedy with courage and faith, choosing reconciliation over retribution, healing over hatred. Believing that the death penalty is a form of social violence that only repeats and perpetuates the violence that claimed their loved ones' lives, they hold out the hope of redemption even for those who have committed the most hideous crimes. Weaving third-person narrative with wrenching first-hand accounts, King presents the stories of ten MVFR members. Each is a heartrending tale of grief, soul searching, and of the challenge to choose forgiveness instead of revenge. These stories, which King sets in the context of the national discussion over the death penalty debate and restorative versus retributive justice, will appeal not only to those who oppose the death penalty, but also to those who strive to understand how people can forgive the seemingly unforgivable. Rachel King is a legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington national office where she lobbies on crime policy. She is currently working on a book about the families of death row inmates.

Against Capital Punishment

Against Capital Punishment PDF Author: Benjamin S. Yost
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190901187
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book

Book Description
The specter of procedural injustice motivates many popular and scholarly objections to capital punishment. So-called proceduralist arguments against the death penalty are attractive to death penalty abolitionists because they sidestep the controversies that bedevil moral critiques of execution. Proceduralists do not shoulder the burden of demonstrating that heinous murderers deserve a punishment less than death. However, proceduralist arguments often pay insufficient attention to the importance of punishment; many imply the highly contentious claim that no type of criminal sanction is legitimate. In Against Capital Punishment, Benjamin S. Yost revitalizes the core of proceduralism both by examining the connection between procedural injustice and the impermissibility of capital punishment and by offering a comprehensive argument of his own which confronts proceduralism's most significant shortcomings. Yost is the first author to develop and defend the irrevocability argument against capital punishment, demonstrating that the irremediability of execution renders capital punishment impermissible. His contention is not that the act of execution is immoral, but rather that the possibility of irrevocable mistakes precludes the just administration of the death penalty. Shoring up proceduralist arguments for the abolition of the death penalty, Against Capital Punishment carries with it implications not only for the continued use of the death penalty in the criminal justice system, but also for the structure and integrity of the system as a whole.

Slavery and the Death Penalty

Slavery and the Death Penalty PDF Author: Bharat Malkani
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317054423
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book

Book Description
It has long been acknowledged that the death penalty in the United States of America has been shaped by the country’s history of slavery and racial violence, but this book considers the lesser-explored relationship between the two practices’ respective abolitionist movements. The book explains how the historical and conceptual links between slavery and capital punishment have both helped and hindered efforts to end capital punishment. The comparative study also sheds light on the nature of such efforts, and offers lessons for how death penalty abolitionism should proceed in future. Using the history of slavery and abolition, it is argued that anti-death penalty efforts should be premised on the ideologies of the radical slavery abolitionists.