"Unique among Western democracies in refusing to eradicate the death penalty, the United States has attempted instead to reform and rationalize state death penalty practices through federal constitutional law. Courting Death traces the unusual and distinctive history of top-down judicial regulation of capital punishment under the Constitution and its unanticipated consequences for our time. In the 1960s and 1970s, in the face of widespread abolition...

Drawing on never-before-published original source detail, the epic story of two of the most consequential, and largely forgotten, moments in Supreme Court history.

"Published in cooperation with Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, California."--T.p.

Elizabeth Bruenig's sensitive reporting pulls back the curtain on a routine crisis in America's death chambers: state executioners' inability to kill the condemned humanely. She takes readers to the torturous final moments of death row inmates while considering the often heinous crimes that led to their sentences. Thoughtful and profound, Bruenig's writing negotiates the culture of violence in America, asking what's at stake when we refuse to see...

In this reasoned exploration of justice, retribution, and redemption, the champion of the new monastic movement, popular speaker, and author of the bestselling The Irresistible Revolution offers a powerful and persuasive appeal for the abolition of the death penalty. The Bible says an eye for an eye. But is the state's taking of a life true-or even practical-punishment for convicted prisoners? In this thought-provoking work, Shane Claiborne explores...

African Americans and Criminal Justice: An Encyclopedia comprises descriptive essays documenting the ways in which people of African descent have been victimized by oppressive laws enacted by local, state, and federal authorities in the United States. The entries also describe how Blacks became disproportionately represented in national crime statistics, largely through their efforts to resist legalized oppression in early American history, and presents...

Based very closely on the 1924 Chicago murder case of Loeb-Leopold, in which two wealthy law-school students who thought that they had commited the perfect crime are on trial for murder.