San Antonio College Library

Explores capital punishment through essays written by death row inmates, people who work with them, and people that have been affected by the death penalty.

A professor of social psychology explores the history of execution in America, weighing its social costs, discussing its potential benefits and problems, and building a new model for understanding the politics behind the death penalty.

There is no light darker than that which filters through the cells and souls on death row. Now David Von Drehle, the prizewinning journalist of The Washington Post, takes us as never before into the world of death row inmates, the world of those who have been the victims of their crimes, and the world of those who have the power to punish by killing. Among the Lowest of the Dead introduces us to the lawyers who run their lives into the ground fighting...

Examines and explains the laws of capital punishment as they exist in the United States as of 1998, focusing primarily on issues that are resolved after a defendant has been convicted of a capital crime.

The author, a constitutional scholar, examines the way the Supreme Court has dealt with the death penalty from the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century.

When news breaks that a convicted murderer, released from prison, has killed again, or that an innocent person has escaped the death chamber in light of new DNA evidence, arguments about capital punishment inevitably heat up. Few controversies continue to stir as much emotion as this one, and public confusion is often the result. This volume brings together seven experts -- judges, lawyers, prosecutors, and philosophers -- to debate the death penalty...

"After a decade of dormancy, the capital punishment debate has asserted itself as a major political and social issue, and support for the death penalty, while still high, has dropped to its lowest level in nineteen years. America is clearly ready to ask the question "Who owns death?"" "In this book, Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, take an unusual approach to the issue. By exploring the mind-sets of those directly involved in the death penalty,...

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. Emerging from the height of 1970s disillusion, the simplicity and moral power of the death penalty became a potent symbol for many Americans of what government could do, and LaChance argues, fascinatingly, that it's the very failure of capital punishment to live up to that mythology...

Presents essays on a variety of aspects regarding the death penalty, including debates on its effect on crimes as a deterrent.