SCHR: Death Penalty, Recommended Books and Films
BOOKS
James Allen et al., Without
Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, (Twin Palms Publishers
2000 (photographs of lynchings with essays by Congressman John Lewis,
James Allen, Hilton Als and Leon F. Litwack)
David Baldus, George Woodworth & Charles A. Pulaski, Jr., Equal Justice and
the Death Penalty; A Legal and Empirical Analysis (Northeastern U. Press 1990)
Purchase
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Stuart Banner, The Death
Penalty: An American History (Harvard University Press 2002) (a comprehensive
history of the death penalty in the United States)
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Hugo Adam Bedau, ed., The
Death Penalty in America (Oxford U. Press 1997) (includes sections
on law of capital punishment, deterrence and incapacitation, race and class
issues)
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Malcolm Braly, False Starts: A Memoir of San Quintin and Other Prisons
(Penguin 1976) Purchase
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W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South (U. Illinois Press 1993)
(a history of racial violence in Georgia and Virginia in the twentieth century)
Purchase
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Fox Butterfield, All God's Children: The Boskey Family and the American Tradition
of Violence (Knopf 1995) (a history of violence from slavery to generation to
generation in one family)
Purchase
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Don Cabana, Death at
Midnight: Confessions of an Executioner (the former warden of the
Mississippi State Penitentiary discusses his experiences)
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Dan Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South
(LSU Press,
revised edition, 1991) (description of the famous "Scottsboro boys case" where
nine African American youths were charged with rape of two white women)
Purchase
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Ronald W. Conley, Ruth Luckasson & George N.
Bouthilet, The Criminal Justice
System and Mental Retardation (Paul H. Brookes Pub. Co. 1992)
Purchase
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Nick Davies, White Lies: Rape, Murder and Justice Texas Style (Pantheon
Books 1991) (death of teenage cheerleader leads to conviction and death sentencing of
Clarence Brantley, a black school janitor; book describes the process of unraveling the
lies, deceptions, and racism underlying that conviction)
Purchase
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David R. Dow
& Mark Dow, editors, Machinery of Death: The Reality of America's
Death Penalty Regime (with a foreword by Christopher Hitchens) (Routledge,
2002, $17.95) (a collection of essays and interviews from lawyers,
wardens, victims' families, executioners and inmates which show how
America's death penalty system actually works, including an essay by Center
director Stephen Bright that argues that the death penalty is a direct
descendant of lynching, other forms of racial violence and racial
oppression, a transcript of the execution of Ivon Ray Stanley, and a chapter
by Bud Welch, the father of a victim of Timothy McVeigh, on how he came to
oppose the death penalty).
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David Von Drehle, Among the Lowest of the Dead (Random House 1995) (a
history of Florida's implementation of the capital punishment statute it adopted in 1973)
Purchase
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Pete Earley, Circumstantial Evidence: Death, Life and Justice in a Southern Town
(Bantam Books 1995) (a description of the case of Walter McMillian in Monroeville,
Alabama, who was freed after six years on death row)
Purchase
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Albert French, Billy (Viking 1993) (novel about race and the death penalty
for a 10-year old boy in Mississippi in the 1930's)
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Lawrence M. Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History
(BasicBooks 1993)
Purchase
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Thomas Frisbie and Randy
Garrett, Victims of Justice Revisited
(Northwestern University Press
May, 2005)
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Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying (Knopf 1993) (novel about race,
death and identity set in Louisiana in the 1940's)
Purchase
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Mikal Gilmore, Shot in the Heart (Doubleday 1993) (the brother of Gary
Gilmore, executed in Utah in 1977, describes their family life and other forces that may
have contributed to Gary Gilmore's antisocial behavior)
Purchase
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James Goodman, Stories of
Scottsboro (Pantheon Books 1994) (an excellent account of the case
of the "Scottsboro boys")
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Katya
Lezin, Finding Life
on Death Row (Northeastern University Press 1999) (foreword by
Center Director Stephen B. Bright) (descriptions of
the cases of six death row inmates represented by the Southern Center for
Human Rights). For
a more detailed description of the book, click here.
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James J. Megivern, The
Death Penalty: An Historical and Theological Survey (Paulist Press
1997) (theological and historical discussion of the death penalty)
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Michael Meltsner, Cruel and Unusual: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment
(1974)
Purchase
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Kent S. Miller and Michael L.
Radelet, Executing the Mentally Ill: The Criminal
Justice System and the Case of Alvin Ford (Sage Publications 1993)
Purchase
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David M. Oshinsky, Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow
Justice (Free Press 1996)
Purchase
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Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking (Random House 1993) (nun describes her
experiences in counseling people on death row in Louisiana)
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Michael L. Radelet, Hugo Adam Bedau & Constance E. Putnam, In Spite of
Innocence: Erroneous Convictions in Capital Cases (Northeastern University Press
1992)
Purchase
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Austin Sarat, ed., The
Killing State: Capital Punishment in Law, Politics and Culture
(Oxford U. Press 1999) (chapters by various authors about aspects of
capital punishment)
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Schabas, William A., The
Abolition of the Death Penalty in International Law (Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1997)
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Richard Wright, Native Son (Harper & Brothers 1940) (paperback by
HarperPerennial 1993) (classic novel about race, murder and capital punishment)
Purchase
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FILMS
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Dead Man Walking (the movie) (film by Tim Robbins based on the book by
Sister Helen Prejean)
Purchase
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Thin Blue Line (film regarding the wrongful conviction of Randall Dale
Adams in Texas)
Purchase
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My Cousin Vinny (a lighthearted fictional view of a capital trial in
Alabama)
Purchase
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Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1994 documentary about
media exploitation, police corruption, and some very ineffective assistance of counsel)
Purchase
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More
Books & Films
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