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"These essays...show us the human and inhuman realities of capital punishment through the eyes of the condemned and those who work with them. By focusing on those awaiting death, they present the awful truth behind the statistics in concrete, personal terms." â€"William J. Bowers, author of Legal HomicideBetween 1930 and 1967, there were 3,859 executions carried out under state and civil authority in the United States. Since the ten-year moratorium on capital punishment ended in 1977, more than one hundred prisoners have been executed. There are more than two thousand men and women now

"Radelet chronicles the details of each capital punishment trial and execution that took place in Colorado since 1859. Radelet accounts the debates and struggles over the use of the death penalty, placing the hundreds of cases into the context of a gradual worldwide trend away from this punishment"--Provided by publisher

In the 1972 case of Furman v. Georgia, the United States Supreme Court invalidated virtually all existing death penalty statutes in the United States. Consequently, those jurisdictions that wanted to continue to execute were forced to revise their capital sentencing procedures. Since Furman,nearly all aspects of American death penalty law have been rewritten. Left unchanged by both the courts and the legislatures, however, are the ways in which states decide which death-sentenced inmates will have their sentences commuted through the powers of executive clemency.

Based on the case of Alvin Ford, an American death row inmate, this thought-provoking book focuses on the issues raised when the criminal justice system attempts to apply the death penalty to the mentally impaired. Issues addressed include: the definition of mental illness for the purposes of exemption from execution; the evaluation of competence for execution by mental health professionals; the consequences of disagreements among health professionals about a defendant's mental status; and the fate of prisoners who are exempted. Ford's unique case leads the authors to examine more general i

Focusing on the last 25 years of debate, this paper examines the changing nature of death penalty arguments in six specific areas: deterrence, incapacitation, caprice and bias, cost, innocence, and retribution. After reviewing recent changes in public opinion regarding the death penalty, we review the findings of social science research pertinent to each of these issues. Our analysis suggests that social science scholarship is changing the way Americans debate the death penalty. Particularly when viewed within a historical and world-wide context, these changes suggest a gradual movement toward the eventual abolition of capital punishment in America.

Two Supreme Court cases, Furman v. Georgia (1972) and McCleskey v. Kemp (1987) provide the framework for the study discussed in this essay, the largest single-county death penalty study. In Furman, although the issue of race discrimination in death sentencing was central to the litigation and was discussed by several of the justices, the "holding" addressed the issue only indirectly. The Court held that the discretionary death penalty schemes at issue were unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment because death sentences were imposed so infrequently as to create too great a risk of arbitrariness. The Court's subsequently developed remedy was to require state legislatures to "genuinely narrow" death penalty schemes and state courts to engage in "meaningful appellate review" of death sentences. In McCleskey, the Court rejected a death sentence challenge based on a statistical showing of racial discrimination in the state's administration of the death penalty, but left open the possibility that a sufficiently large single-county study finding such racial discrimination could establish an equal protection violation. Our study of capital case charging in San Diego County, California, under California's 1978 Death Penalty Law is just such a study. That law produced a death penalty scheme giving prosecutors the discretion to seek death in the vast majority of murder cases, resulting in a death sentence rate among death-eligible defendants even lower than that of Georgia at the time of Furman. Our study, covering a fourteen-and-ahalf-year period and using data from 1081 cases in which San Diego prosecutors charged an adult defendant with murder and obtained a homicide conviction, examines whether the race or ethnicity of defendants and/or victims affects how that broad prosecutorial discretion is used. We found that race/ethnicity is a significant factor in whether a defendant is charged capitally and whether the death penalty is sought, with the most substantial disparities occurring in cases with black defendants and white victims.