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In the five state region of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky and Missouri, 1027 men and women are known to have been legally hanged, gassed or electrocuted for capital crimes during the century after the Civil War. Drawing on thousands of hours of research, this comprehensive record covers each execution in chronological order, filling numerous gaps in a largely forgotten story of the American experience. The author presents each case dispassionately with the main focus given to essential fa...

Texas prosecutors are powerful: in cases where they seek capital punishment, the defendant is sentenced to death over ninety percent of the time. When management professor Hans Hansen joined Texas’s newly formed death penalty defense team to rethink their approach, they faced almost insurmountable odds. Yet while Hansen was working with the office, they won seventy of seventy-one cases by changing the narrative for death penalty defense. To date, they have succeeded in preventing well over one h...

A shocking true story of a double life undone by murder. When North Carolina farmer Stuart Taylor died after a sudden illness, his 46-year-old fiancée Velma Barfield, was overcome with grief. Taylor's family grieved with her—until the autopsy revealed traces of arsenic poisoning. Turned over to the authorities by her own son, Velma stunned her family with more revelations. This wasn't the first time the born-again Christian and devout Sunday school teacher had committed cold-blooded murder. Tr...

'When silence or tricks of language contribute to maintaining an abuse that must be reformed or a suffering that can be relieved, then there is no other solution but to speak out'Written when execution by guillotine was still legal in France, Albert Camus' devastating attack on the 'obscene exhibition' of capital punishment remains one of the most powerful, persuasive arguments ever made against the death penalty.One of twenty new books in the bestselling Penguin Great Ideas series. This new sel...

How does it feel to defend a serial killer? To tell a young man that he will be executed in twenty minutes' time? To explain to your five-year-old son that you're late because you couldn't help someone? To realise that a death row convict whose life you hold in your hands is actually innocent?David Dow is a leading death row attorney in Texas, a state where 99% of execution appeals are rejected.He defends convicted murderers for the simple reason that he feels putting them to death is wrong. He...

Numerous people face legal execution in the United States. Their presence in death rows throughout the country refutes a basic premise of our judicial system, for the use of capital punishment denies the existence of universal rehabilitation. There is another paradox-juries continue to sentence men and women to death; yet few ever get executed. Whether one is for or against capital punishment, one cannot approach the issue without deep emotion and conviction. James McCafferty provides an even-te...

At the start of the twenty-first century, America is in the midst of a profound national reconsideration of the death penalty. There has been a dramatic decline in the number of people being sentenced to death as well as executed, exonerations have become common, and the number of states abolishing the death penalty is on the rise. The essays featured in The Road to Abolition? track this shift in attitudes toward capital punishment, and consider whether or not the death penalty will ever be abol...

From the cells of Death Row come the chilling, true-life accounts of the most heinous, cruel and depraved killers of modern times. Meet grisly killers such as Bill Joe Benefiel, the 'Superglue Monster', who glued his victims eyes and noses shut, causing them to suffocate. Or Willie Crain, the deviant fisherman, who put his victim into a lobster pot, where it was eaten by sea creatures.Many prisoners on ' the Row' have carried out serial murder, mass murder, spree killing and the desmemberment of...

Many studies during the past few decades have sought to determine whether the death penalty has any deterrent effect on homicide rates. Researchers have reached widely varying, even contradictory, conclusions. Some studies have concluded that the threat of capital punishment deters murders, saving large numbers of lives; other studies have concluded that executions actually increase homicides; still others, that executions have no effect on murder rates. Commentary among researchers, advocates,...

Judicial hanging is regarded by many as being the quintessentially British execution. However, many other methods of capital punishment have been used in this country; ranging from burning, beheading and shooting to crushing and boiling to death. Execution: A History of Capital Punishment in Britain explores these types of execution in detail. Readers may be surprised to learn that a means of mechanical decapitation, the Halifax Gibbet, was being used in England five hundred years before the gui...

Irish Political Prisoners presents a detailed and gripping overview of political imprisonment from 1920-1962. Seán McConville examines the years from the formation of the Northern Ireland state to the release of the last border campaign prisoners in 1962. Drawing extensively and, in many cases, uniquely on archives and special collections in the three jurisdictions, and interviews with survivors from the period, McConville demonstrates how punishment came to embody and shape the nationalist co...

The Royal Armouries is Britain's oldest museum, still partly housed in its original buildings in the Tower of London. The core of the collection is the medieval arsenal that was restocked by Henry VIII and on show to privileged visitors as early as the reign of Elizabeth I. After 1660, the general public was admitted and a series of spectacular exhibits was set up, one of which included instruments of torture and punishment. Since that time, they have been one of the Tower's prime attractions, e...

The second unputdownable book in the acclaimed THE LOOP trilogy - perfect for fans of The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner ... 'A terrifying and sinister look into the future that will leave your jaw on the floor.' KASS MORGAN, New York Times bestselling author of THE 100 on book 1 'Your next YA obsession.' ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY on book 1 'Fans of The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner should look no further ... Thrilling and ter...

In a dusty German bookshop, the noted historian Joel F. Harrington stumbled upon a remarkable document: the journal of a sixteenth-century executioner. The journal gave an account of the 394 people Meister Frantz Schmidt executed, and the hundreds more he tortured, flogged, or disfigured for more than forty-five years in the city of Nuremberg. But the portrait of Schmidt that gradually emerged was not that of a monster. Could a man who practiced such cruelty also be insightful, compassionate - e...

This book systematically investigates the capital punishment of girls and women in one jurisdiction in the United States over nearly four centuries. Using Connecticut as an essential case study, due to its long history as a colony and a state, this study is the first of its kind not only for New England but for the United States. The author uses rich archival sources to look critically at the gendered differential in the application of the death penalty from the seventeenth century until the abo...

Jane Bell is a murderer. At 4.55pm on 15th January, Jane Bell hit a man with her car, killing him instantly. With witnesses, CCTV footage and a signed confession, her guilt is never in doubt. Jane Bell is a hero. But she doesn't feel guilty. Because James Foster was about to blow up a primary school. He was planning on killing hundreds of children. He was going to kill her children. What would you have done? Readers love The Choice! 'Absolutely phenomenal... Fantastically written... Gr...

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A rigorous and defiant collection that subverts contemporary discourse and representations of incarceration, of hip-hop, and of Asian American culture and literature.  Justin Rovillos Monson’s poetic voice is sharp and irreverent—improvisational yet thoughtful, musical, and tender, achieving a range of lyrical registers woven seamlessly throughout the book from the first to last poem. Monson’s work challenges his readers with uncomfortable but essential, urgent, and necessary questions: What d...