Slavery and the Death Penalty

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

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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.

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.

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

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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.

Homicide Justified

Homicide Justified PDF Author: Andrew Fede
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820351121
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
This comparative study looks at the laws concerning the murder of slaves by their masters and at how these laws were implemented. Andrew T. Fede cites a wide range of cases--across time, place, and circumstance--to illuminate legal, judicial, and other complexities surrounding this regrettably common occurrence. These laws had evolved to limit in different ways the masters' rights to severely punish and even kill their slaves while protecting valuable enslaved people, understood as "property," from wanton destruction by hirers, overseers, and poor whites who did not own slaves. To explore the conflicts of masters' rights with state and colonial laws, Fede shows how slave homicide law evolved and was enforced not only in the United States but also in ancient Roman, Visigoth, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British jurisdictions. His comparative approach reveals how legal reforms regarding slave homicide in antebellum times, like past reforms dictated by emperors and kings, were the products of changing perceptions of the interests of the public; of the individual slave owners; and of the slave owners' families, heirs, and creditors. Although some slave murders came to be regarded as capital offenses, the laws con-sistently reinforced the second-class status of slaves. This influence, Fede concludes, flowed over into the application of law to free African Americans and would even make itself felt in the legal attitudes that underlay the Jim Crow era.

Peculiar Institution

Peculiar Institution PDF Author: David Garland
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674058488
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
The U.S. death penalty is a peculiar institution, and a uniquely American one. Despite its comprehensive abolition elsewhere in the Western world, capital punishment continues in dozens of American states– a fact that is frequently discussed but rarely understood. The same puzzlement surrounds the peculiar form that American capital punishment now takes, with its uneven application, its seemingly endless delays, and the uncertainty of its ever being carried out in individual cases, none of which seem conducive to effective crime control or criminal justice. In a brilliantly provocative study, David Garland explains this tenacity and shows how death penalty practice has come to bear the distinctive hallmarks of America’s political institutions and cultural conflicts. America’s radical federalism and local democracy, as well as its legacy of violence and racism, account for our divergence from the rest of the West. Whereas the elites of other nations were able to impose nationwide abolition from above despite public objections, American elites are unable– and unwilling– to end a punishment that has the support of local majorities and a storied place in popular culture. In the course of hundreds of decisions, federal courts sought to rationalize and civilize an institution that too often resembled a lynching, producing layers of legal process but also delays and reversals. Yet the Supreme Court insists that the issue is to be decided by local political actors and public opinion. So the death penalty continues to respond to popular will, enhancing the power of criminal justice professionals, providing drama for the media, and bringing pleasure to a public audience who consumes its chilling tales. Garland brings a new clarity to our understanding of this peculiar institution– and a new challenge to supporters and opponents alike.

Enduring Injustice

Enduring Injustice PDF Author: Jeff Spinner-Halev
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107017513
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Argues that understanding the impact of past injustices faced by some peoples can help us understand and overcome injustice today.

Courting Death

Courting Death PDF Author: Carol S. Steiker
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674737423
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Refusing to eradicate the death penalty, the U.S. has attempted to reform and rationalize capital punishment through federal constitutional law. While execution chambers remain active in several states, Carol Steiker and Jordan Steiker argue that the fate of the American death penalty is likely to be sealed by this failed judicial experiment.

From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State

From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State PDF Author: Charles J. Ogletree
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814740219
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Situates the linkage between race and the death penalty in the history of the U.S. Since 1976, over forty percent of prisoners executed in American jails have been African American or Hispanic. This trend shows little evidence of diminishing, and follows a larger pattern of the violent criminalization of African American populations that has marked the country's history of punishment. In a bold attempt to tackle the looming question of how and why the connection between race and the death penalty has been so strong throughout American history, Ogletree and Sarat headline an interdisciplinary cast of experts in reflecting on this disturbing issue. Insightful original essays approach the topic from legal, historical, cultural, and social science perspectives to show the ways that the death penalty is racialized, the places in the death penalty process where race makes a difference, and the ways that meanings of race in the United States are constructed in and through our practices of capital punishment. From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State not only uncovers the ways that race influences capital punishment, but also attempts to situate the linkage between race and the death penalty in the history of this country, in particular the history of lynching. In its probing examination of how and why the connection between race and the death penalty has been so strong throughout American history, this book forces us to consider how the death penalty gives meaning to race as well as why the racialization of the death penalty is uniquely American.

Executions in the United States, 1608-1987

Executions in the United States, 1608-1987 PDF Author: M. Watt Espy
Publisher: Inter-University Consortium for Political & Social Research
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
This study furnishes data on executions performed in the United States under civil authority. It includes a description of each individual executed and the circumstances surrounding the crime for which the person was convicted. Variables include age, race, name, sex, and occupation of the offender, place, jurisdiction, date and method of execution and the crime for which the offender was executed.

Slavery and Crime in Missouri, 1773-1865

Slavery and Crime in Missouri, 1773-1865 PDF Author: Harriet C. Frazier
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786409778
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Slavery and its lasting effects have long been an issue in America, with the scars inflicted running deep. This study examines crimes such as stealing, burglary, arson, rape and murder committed against and by slaves, with most of the author's information coming from handwritten court records and newspapers. These documents show the death penalty rarely applied when a slave killed another slave, but that it always applied when a slave killed a white person. Despite Missouri's grim criminal justice system, the state's best lawyers were called upon to represent slaves in court on serious criminal charges, and federal law applied to all persons, granting slaves in Missouri protection that few other slave states had. By 1860, Missouri's population was only 10 percent slave, the smallest percentage of any slave state in America.

Where Justice and Mercy Meet

Where Justice and Mercy Meet PDF Author: Vicki Schieber
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 0814635334
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Where Justice and Mercy Meet: Catholic Opposition to the Death Penalty comprehensively explores the Catholic stance against capital punishment in new and important ways. The broad perspective of this book has been shaped in conversation with the Catholic Mobilizing Network to End the Use of the Death Penalty, as well as through the witness of family members of murder victims and the spiritual advisors of condemned inmates. The book offers the reader new insight into the debates about capital punishment; provides revealing, and sometimes surprising, information about methods of execution; and explores national and international trends and movements related to the death penalty. It also addresses how the death penalty has been intertwined with racism, the high percentage of the mentally disabled on death row, and how the death penalty disproportionately affects the poor. The foundation for the church's position on the death penalty is illuminated by discussion of the life and death of Jesus, Scripture, the Mass, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the teachings of Pope John Paul II. Written for concerned Catholics and other interested readers, the book contains contemporary stories and examples, as well as discussion questions to engage groups in exploring complex issues.