The Death of Punishment


Book Description

For twelve years Robert Blecker, a criminal law professor, wandered freely inside Lorton Central Prison, armed only with cigarettes and a tape recorder. The Death of Punishment tests legal philosophy against the reality and wisdom of street criminals and their guards. Some killers' poignant circumstances should lead us to mercy; others show clearly why they should die. After thousands of hours over twenty-five years inside maximum security prisons and on death rows in seven states, the history and philosophy professor exposes the perversity of justice: Inside prison, ironically, it's nobody's job to punish. Thus the worst criminals often live the best lives. The Death of Punishment challenges the reader to refine deeply held beliefs on life and death as punishment that flare up with every news story of a heinous crime. It argues that society must redesign life and death in prison to make the punishment more nearly fit the crime. It closes with the final irony: If we make prison the punishment it should be, we may well abolish the very death penalty justice now requires.




Grace and Justice on Death Row


Book Description

A Washington Post bestseller! A chilling and compassionate look at how close an innocent man was to being put death with a foreword by Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking. What is worse than having a client on Death Row in Texas? Having a client on Death Row in Texas who is innocent and not knowing if you will be able to stop his execution in time. Grace and Justice on Death Row: A Race Against Time to Free an Innocent Man tells the story of Alfred Dewayne Brown, a man who spent over twelve years in prison (ten of them on Texas’ infamous Death Row) for a high-profile crime he did not commit, and his lawyer, Brian Stolarz, who dedicated his career and life to secure his freedom. The book chronicles Brown’s extraordinary journey to freedom against very long odds, overcoming unscrupulous prosecutors, corrupt police, inadequate defense counsel, and a broken criminal justice system. The book examines how a lawyer-client relationship turned into one of brotherhood. Grace And Justice On Death Row also addresses many issues facing the criminal justice system and the death penalty – race, class, adequate defense counsel, and intellectual disability, and proposes reforms. Told from Stolarz’s perspective, this raw, fast-paced look into what it took to save one man’s life will leave you questioning the criminal justice system in this country. It is a story of injustice and redemption that must be told.




Digital Dead End


Book Description

The realities of the high-tech global economy for women and families in the United States. The idea that technology will pave the road to prosperity has been promoted through both boom and bust. Today we are told that universal broadband access, high-tech jobs, and cutting-edge science will pull us out of our current economic downturn and move us toward social and economic equality. In Digital Dead End, Virginia Eubanks argues that to believe this is to engage in a kind of magical thinking: a technological utopia will come about simply because we want it to. This vision of the miraculous power of high-tech development is driven by flawed assumptions about race, class, and gender. The realities of the information age are more complicated, particularly for poor and working-class women and families. For them, information technology can be both a tool of liberation and a means of oppression. But despite the inequities of the high-tech global economy, optimism and innovation flourished when Eubanks worked with a community of resourceful women living at her local YWCA. Eubanks describes a new approach to creating a broadly inclusive and empowering “technology for people,” popular technology, which entails shifting the focus from teaching technical skill to nurturing critical technological citizenship, building resources for learning, and fostering social movement. Important Notice: The digital edition of this book is missing some of the images found in the physical edition.




A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America


Book Description

New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice 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. For two hundred years, the constitutionality of capital punishment had been axiomatic. But in 1962, Justice Arthur Goldberg and his clerk Alan Dershowitz dared to suggest otherwise, launching an underfunded band of civil rights attorneys on a quixotic crusade. In 1972, in a most unlikely victory, the Supreme Court struck down Georgia’s death penalty law in Furman v. Georgia. Though the decision had sharply divided the justices, nearly everyone, including the justices themselves, believed Furman would mean the end of executions in America. Instead, states responded with a swift and decisive showing of support for capital punishment. As anxiety about crime rose and public approval of the Supreme Court declined, the stage was set in 1976 for Gregg v. Georgia, in which the Court dramatically reversed direction. A Wild Justice is an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at the Court, the justices, and the political complexities of one of the most racially charged and morally vexing issues of our time.




Circumstantial Evidence


Book Description

A piercing, provocative true story that is also a commentary on our system of justice, centered around a wrongful murder conviction that bares the dark side of the American soul. This book highlights a case that was front page news--featured on "60 Minutes", in The New York Times in 1993.




Real Justice: Fourteen and Sentenced to Death


Book Description

At fourteen, Steve Truscott was a typical teenager in rural Ontario in the fifties, mainly concerned about going fishing, playing football, and racing bikes with his friends. One summer evening, his twelve-year-old classmate, Lynne Harper, asked for a lift to the nearby highway on his bicycle and Steve agreed. Unfortunately, that made Steve the last person known to see Lynne alive. His world collapsed around him when he was arrested and then convicted of killing Lynne Harper. The penalty at the time was death by hanging. Although the sentence was changed to life in prison, Steve suffered for years behind bars for a murder he didn't commit. When his case gained national attention, the Supreme Court of Canada reviewed the evidence -- and confirmed his conviction. It took over forty years and a determination to prove his innocence for him to finally clear his name. He has since received an apology and compensation for his ordeal. In this book, young readers will discover how an innocent boy was presumed guilty by the justice system, and how in the end, that same justice system, prodded by Truscott and his lawyers, was able to acknowledge the terrible wrong done to him. [Fry reading level - 4.8




Missing & Presumed Dead


Book Description

Take a rare insider’s look at a mysterious world most people have only seen on television. Join Gale St. John on her amazing journey as a psychic sleuth who has helped find missing persons from Ohio to Kathmandu, with victims ranging from innocent young children to Mafia bosses. Missing and Presumed Dead shows you how Gale is able to tune in to a missing person, describing what she sees, hears, and feels to detect whether the individual is alive or not. Discover her extensive work with specially trained dogs that search for the missing. Experience high profile cases, including the ones where spirits help Gale save lives. Each extraordinary account—from those that made national headlines to those that are still unsolved—sheds light on the dramatic life of a psychic detective. Praise: “The heart-pounding suspense will keep you turning pages thinking you know the answers, while realizing nothing is like it seems.”—Marta Sosa, producer and host of the online radio show “Missing in America”




Left for Dead


Book Description

For fans of sea battles, adventures, and war stories like Unbroken, this is the incredible true story of a boy who helps to bring closure to the survivors of the tragic sinking of the USS Indianapolis, and helps exonerate the ship’s captain fifty years later. Hunter Scott first learned about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis by watching the movie Jaws when he was just eleven-years-old. This was fifty years after the ship had sunk, throwing more than 1,000 men into shark-infested waters—a long fifty years in which justice still had not been served. It was just after midnight on July 30, 1945 when the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. Those who survived the fiery sinking—some injured, many without life jackets—struggled to stay afloat as they waited for rescue. But the United States Navy did not even know they were missing. As time went on, the Navy needed a scapegoat for this disaster. So it court-martialed the captain for “hazarding” his ship. The survivors of the Indianapolis knew that their captain was not to blame. For fifty years they worked to clear his name, even after his untimely death. But the navy would not budge—not until Hunter entered the picture. His history fair project on the Indianapolis soon became a crusade to restore the captain’s good name and the honor of the men who served under him.




Dead Heat


Book Description

Today's "extreme weather events" (record-breaking heat waves, droughts, and melting ice caps) foreshadow an increasingly unstable and dire future. Yet, despite all, the US government continues to reject the Kyoto Protocol, to deny the catastrophic consequences of oil dependency, and to define the politics of oil as the politics of U.S. unilateralism, domination, and war. Dead Heat argues that justice—not rhetoric and "aid" but real developmental justice for the people of developing world—is going to be necessary, and surprisingly soon. It argues, more particularly, that such a justice must involve a phased transition from the Kyoto Protocol to a new climate treaty based on equal human rights to emit greenhouse pollutants. Dead Heat makes the case for climate justice, but insists that justice and equity, for all their manifold ethical and humanitarian attractions, must also be seen as the most "realistic" of virtues. It insists, in other words, that our limited environmental space will itself show that it is the dream of a "business as usual" future that is naïve and utopian.




The Dead Cry Justice


Book Description

For fans of HBO’s The Gilded Age, explore the dark side of the alluring world of America’s 19th century elite in this gripping series of riveting mysteries… Heiress-turned-sleuth Prudence MacKenzie and ex-Pinkerton Geoffrey Hunter step out of the elite society of Gilded Age New York as they venture into the city’s crime ridden streets and most dangerous neighborhoods to search for two missing children . . . THE DEAD CRY JUSTICE May 1890: As NYU Law School finally agrees to admit female law students, Judge MacKenzie’s daughter Prudence weighs her choices carefully. Chief among her concerns is how her decision would affect the Hunter and MacKenzie Investigative Law agency and her professional and personal relationship with the partner who is currently recuperating from a near fatal shooting. But an even more pressing issue presents itself in the form of a street urchin, whose act of petty theft inadvertently leads Prudence to a badly beaten girl he is protecting. Fearing for the girl’s life, Prudence rushes her to the Friends Refuge for the Sick Poor, run by the compassionate Charity Sloan. When the boy and girl slip out of their care and run away, Prudence suspects they are fleeing a dangerous predator and is desperate to find them. Aided by the photographer and social reformer Jacob Riis and the famous journalist Nellie Bly, Prudence and Geoffrey scour the tenements and brothels of Five Points. Their only clue is a mysterious doll with an odd resemblance to the missing girl. But as the destitute orphans they encounter whisper the nickname of the killer who stalks them—Il diavolo—Prudence and Geoffrey must race against time to find the missing children before their merciless enemies do . . .