I had been working with the condemned since 1975--but never before had an execution affected me with this much power and confusion.

Throughout his forty-five years visiting death rows across the American South, Joe Ingle has learned, loved, and suffered intensely. In Too Close to the Flame, Ingle describes how the events of 2018-2020 finally exposed the deep wounds inflicted on his psyche by nearly half a century of enduring the state-sanctioned murder of friend after friend.

As an advocate for the men and women condemned to death by an unjust legal system that routinely victimizes the marginalized, Ingle has often found himself waiting through the darkest hours as the spiritual advisor and sole companion of those on deathwatch--the brief period of isolation that precedes an execution. In vivid detail and startling candor, Ingle describes every moment with the expertise of a scholar and the affection of a brother. Through Ingle's eyes, we are invited into the inner sanctum during desperate attempts at clemency, intimate final hours, and the mourning that follows a night on deathwatch.

Part psychological memoir, part history of Southern state killing since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, Too Close to the Flame is above all a catalogue of love--a gallery of relationships that could only be forged between people staring death in the face together. It is an account of the price of radical Christian love, a record of service to the least among us, and a testament to the full humanity of those whom the powers that be would seek to dehumanize and exterminate.

The death penalty was Virginia's longest continuing tradition, dating back to 1608 when Capt. George Kendall was shot for treason. Since then, Virginia has executed 1,390 people, more than any other state. This number includes 94 women, 736 enslaved people, and at least 16 children whose ages were verified between 11 and 17.

Closing the Slaughterhouse exposes the corruption and systemic racial bias of Virginia's death penalty. Virginia used capital punishment as legal lynching, wielding it primarily against Blacks in crimes against whites. In addition to the significant number of executions, between 1976 and 2017, Virginia streamlined the legal process, killing people twice as fast as other states.

On July 1, 2021, the former capital of the Confederacy became the first southern state to abolish the death penalty, led by a bipartisan coalition adopting a deliberate, bipartisan, and systematic approach. Abolition was the culmination of a tireless, decades-long effort to achieve this once unattainable goal, led by sometimes larger-than-life personalities, volunteers, non-profit organizations, and numerous others.

Closing the Slaughterhouse traces all 413 years of Virginia's death penalty.

Based on the sermon series that garnered top honors from Yale Divinity School, Finding Joy on Death Row is the powerful story of a broken preacher's transformative experience learning about joy from Death Row prisoners, combined with dramatic handwritten responses from more than twenty men currently sentenced to die.

In Finding Joy on Death Row: Unexpected Lessons from Lives We Discarded, Williams journeys into the hearts and minds of those sentenced to death, illuminating for readers the ways in which the human spirit can suffer--and soar.

Finding Joy on Death Row includes dozens of handwritten statements from those facing capital punishment. The testimonies and contemplations of those sentenced to die offer readers a unique opportunity to hear from individuals whose lives are marked by their looming execution. And yet these prisoners have--in the midst of grim circumstances--managed to find joy.

As Williams serves and shepherds these prisoners, their own stories are unveiled. Williams's account of ministering within North Carolina's prison system and the handwritten statements are punctuated by glimpses into the author's own broken past. This important work will show readers the power of joy to reach us all, the free and imprisoned alike.

Finding Joy on Death Row:

• Offers a glimpse into the minds of those currently and formerly on Death Row
• Presents the effects of the death penalty not only on the incarcerated but on their loved ones as well
• Examines Williams's own experiences that gave him a unique understanding and empathy for those sentenced to death
• Explores the very real possibility of finding joy despite outward circumstances
• Includes online access to transcriptions of the prisoners' responses as well as Pastor Williams's original sermon series

Unprecedented and revealing, Finding Joy on Death Row provides a window into the tragedies, hardships, and victories of those sentenced to die, ultimately offering readers the encouragement that we are all loved, forgiven, and capable of transformation.

At a time when the United States is undertaking an unprecedented national reconsideration of the death penalty, Death Penalty in Decline? seeks to evaluate how abolitionists might succeed today.

Contributors: John Bessler, Corinna Barrett Lain, James R. Martel, Linda Ross Meyer, Carol S. Steiker, Jordan M. Steiker, and the editor

Powerful, wry essays offering modern takes on a primitive practice, from one of our most widely read death penalty abolitionists

As Ruth Bader Ginsburg has noted, people who are well represented at trial rarely get the death penalty. But as Marc Bookman shows in a dozen brilliant essays, the problems with capital punishment run far deeper than just bad representation. Exploring prosecutorial misconduct, racist judges and jurors, drunken lawyering, and executing the innocent and the mentally ill, these essays demonstrate that precious few people on trial for their lives get the fair trial the Constitution demands.

Today, death penalty cases continue to capture the hearts, minds, and eblasts of progressives of all stripes--including the rich and famous (see Kim Kardashian's advocacy)--but few people with firsthand knowledge of America's injustice system have the literary chops to bring death penalty stories to life.

Enter Marc Bookman. With a voice that is both literary and journalistic, the veteran capital defense lawyer and seven-time Best American Essays notable author exposes the dark absurdities and fatal inanities that undermine the logic of the death penalty wherever it still exists. In essays that cover seemingly ordinary capital cases over the last thirty years, Bookman shows how violent crime brings out our worst human instincts--revenge, fear, retribution, and prejudice. Combining these emotions with the criminal legal system's weaknesses--purposely ineffective, arbitrary, or widely infected with racism and misogyny--is a recipe for injustice.

Bookman has been charming and educating readers in the pages of The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and Slate for years. His wit and wisdom are now collected and preserved in A Descending Spiral.

At a time when the United States is undertaking an unprecedented national reconsideration of the death penalty, Death Penalty in Decline? seeks to evaluate how abolitionists might succeed today.

Contributors: John Bessler, Corinna Barrett Lain, James R. Martel, Linda Ross Meyer, Carol S. Steiker, Jordan M. Steiker, and the editor

Alan Dershowitz has been called one of the most prominent and consistent defenders of civil liberties in America by Politico and the nation's most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer and one of its most distinguished defenders of individual rights by Newsweek. His legal career as a criminal defense lawyer has been deeply involved with death and life decisions.

Dershowitz on Killing is a timely examination of issues and questions that are front and center in today's society. Employing a philosophical, moral, religious, and cultural lens to the legal aspects surrounding death and life, Dershowitz elucidates the role of government to determine who shall live and who shall die in declaring wars, ordering executions, authorizing deadly force, permitting or denying abortions, providing or mandating vaccines, controlling climate change, allowing or refusing asylum for endangered migrants, and other life and death rulings. He notes that when the government decides these choices, it is asked to do so by first determining whether a right is involved, because rights trump mere interest, just as constitutional restrictions trump legislative and executive actions.

Dershowitz on Killing asserts that the rules governing death and life decisions should reflect the irreversibility of death. It is essential reading for anyone interested in or concerned about how these decisions are allocated among state and federal; executive, legislative, and judicial; private and governmental; religious and secular institutions--and how people in a democracy, through the power of the ballot, have the ultimate say in these critical decisions.

An updated edition of the classic study of capital punishment originally published 50 years ago, with a new introduction by Barry Jones.

The Penalty Is Death was first published in 1968, in the aftermath of the hanging of Ronald Ryan in Victoria--the last man executed in Australia. At the time, capital punishment had been abolished as the penalty for murder in only 30 nations, although there was a moratorium on its use in many more. In 2022, the number of abolitionist nations has risen to 108, and 54 more have longstanding moratoriums. The World Coalition against the Death Penalty reported the number of recorded executions in 2021 at 2,397, with about 2,000 in China.

Drawing on a wide range of historical and contemporary sources, The Penalty Is Death includes some of the most significant voices in the international history of debates about capital punishment from the eighteenth century to the present day. It contains a historical overview of the arguments for and against capital punishment; legal, political, and philosophical analysis and commentary; and firsthand accounts of the reality of executions and their aftermaths.

It features the views of great novelists such as Charles Dickens, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, and George Orwell; philosophers such as Max Charlesworth; legal scholars such as Cesare Beccaria; and rigid enforcers such as J. Edgar Hoover. Barry Jones's important new introduction brings the story up to date, including the continuing use of the death penalty in the US.

Killing Justice in the Lone Star State is a reality check on active Death Row cases (and some post-execution ones). The book offers a fresh perspective for campaigners and reformers which ranges across theory, policy and practice. It also explains the much criticised Texas 'law of parties.'

Many organizations are engaged in a race to prevent the execution of death sentenced prisoners in Texas (and elsewhere in the USA). Some men and women on Death Row claim to be completely innocent as described in this book.

Michael O'Brien - who was himself wrongly convicted of murder - dissects cases with the eye of someone who has spent years watching how miscarriages of justice happen and why. He explains how practitioners and others are in denial and tunnel vision helps to sustain politicians, livelihoods and profits that depend on a conveyor belt from the courts to the execution chamber. He describes a killing process aided by bias, discrimination, prejudice, unfair trials, supposed expert evidence and closed minds. This is just one hallmark of a country obsessed with guns, violence and the ultimate penalty.

Texas is the most punitive place within one of the harshest penal systems in the world. But no legal system should take away human lives, especially one tarnished by defects of the kind the author sets out in this book.

Eric de Bellaigue has attempted to answer the questions posed by D'Israeli by crafting a collection drawn only from text written within the confines of prisons. Guarded Words explores the lives of prisoners throughout history, illuminating their wide-ranging reasons for incarceration, and describing the conditions of the prisons that held them. Featuring writings dating back to 1500, this volume spans centuries and crosses continents, taking readers to England, France, and Russia.

Where common ground is apparent it is at the personal level, notably in the causes of imprisonment, which include, for religious views: John Bunyan, Cl ment Marot, Anne Askew, Thomas More, and John Hart; for reasons of State: Walter Raleigh, William Prynne, Antoine Lavoisier, Madame Roland, Andr Ch nier, Jean-Antoine Roucher, the Earl of Surrey, Charles I, and Richard Lovelace; as victims of civil action: William Combe, Theodore von Neuhoff, King of Corsica, Mirabeau, and Voltaire; for dissidence in Russia: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lev Mishchenko, and Irina Ratushinskaya; and for murder: Pierre Fran ois Lacenaire and William Chester Minor.

The writing is accompanied by thirty black-and-white images, textual notes throughout, and an appendix that provides short notes about each writer.

Anant Kumar Tripati does not use the traditional methods for writing law reviews in that, he substantially quote from treatises to emphasize his point.

He focuses on the indigent being denied equality of arms so as to ensure they are imprisoned which violates ICCPR, principled sentencing discussing excessive sentences.

He then examines consecutive sentences, discussing how it became possible for someone to be sentenced to life without parole for a nonviolent offense.

Key Feature:

• Looks into how the US Prison systems imposes penalties and punishment on those who it prosecutes and shows why the system violates ICCPR in ALL 52 states.
• Denying the indigent equality of arms principled sentencing what is an excessive sentence consecutive sentences retroactivity
• Examines The Current Swing against Nonviolent Life without Parole Sentences. It evaluates the Case for an Eighth Amendment Categorical Ban of Life without the Possibility of Parole Sentence for Individuals Convicted of Nonviolent Offenses by Evaluating Objective Evidence of a National Consensus
• Argues effective application of cruel and unusual punishment in Arizona mandates all sentences be revisited by federal and state courts and that portioning punishment should be required in Arizona as the punishment is cruel and unusual and disproportionate under American and international standards.

It may be asked, perhaps, what I hope from this work? I do not hope, I admit, that governments will be convinced of the inutility of capital punishment, still less that they will abandon its employment. Truth glides slowly into the mind of power, and even when it does fairly enter, it is not immediately acknowledged as master. The mind long refuses to believe, and even when forced to believe, it still refuses to obey. There is no occasion to tell why. It is precisely for this reason, that when power is in error, it is necessary to set the public right-to establish in opinion that which will be so long of resolving into fact. - F. Guizot

François Guizot was a prominent 19th-century French historian, statesman, and thinker. In this treatise from 1822, his analysis is both philosophical and pragmatic, reflecting the debates on the morality and efficacy of the death penalty during his time. His arguments contributed to the broader abolitionist discourse, influencing later thinkers and legislative reforms in Europe.

It is no hidden secret that true crime murder stories are not for the faint of heart. They can lead you to double-check your windows and doors at night, and question everything you thought or believed about human nature. Yet they are intriguing and fascinating at the same time.
Each true crime anthology in this collection will leave you to ponder whether the perpetrators of these crimes were really monsters. When you learn of the background of these killers, the age-old question of whether a serial killer is born to kill will be at the forefront of your mind.
Explore the stories behind the murders in these True Crime volumes, the anger, the horror, and the sadism, inflicted by each killer. Feel for the victims, their families, and the investigators who had to deal with each case. And don't be surprised if you have to sleep with the light on
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Information Plus: Capital Punishment provides users with up-to-date statistics and information from numerous authoritative resources all in one volume. The text provides clear and comprehensive summary of the data, which is also vividly illustrated through tables, charts, and graphs.