Perspective from an Electric Chair


Book Description

Author Mo Gerhardt tells what it is like living life while being diagnosed with a terminal disease. Not only from all the bumps, bruises and surgeries from his muscular dystrophy, but also after broken bones from a bus accident and loss of vision in one eye due to a separate non-related medical condition. Instead of taking his diagnosis as a death sentence, Gerhardt uses it as motivation to accomplish everything that a normal person aspires to. From receiving his Bachelors and Masters degrees from Michigan State University to competing and medaling in both national and international adaptive sports competitions, he continues to defy doctors predictions. He continues to give back through his motivational speaking to students and being an activist for the disability community. Through it all, Gerhardt proves that its not the diagnosis that determines ones outcome.




The Electric Chair


Book Description

This book provides a history of the electric chair and analyzes its features, its development, and the manner of its use. Chapters cover the early conceptual stages as a humane alternative to hanging, and the rivalry between Edison and Westinghouse that was one of the main forces in the chair's adoption as a mode of execution. Also presented are an account of the terrible first execution and a number of the subsequent gruesome employments of the chair. The text explores the changing attitudes toward the chair as state after state replaced it with lethal injection.




Old Sparky


Book Description

A shocking exploration of America’s preferred method of capital punishment. In early 2013, Robert Gleason became the latest victim of the electric chair, a peculiarly American execution method. Shouting Póg mo thóin (“Kiss my ass” in Gaelic), he grinned as electricity shot through his system. When the current was switched off, his body slumped against the leather restraints, and Gleeson, who had strangled two fellow inmates to ensure his execution was not postponed, was dead. The execution had gone flawlessly—not a guaranteed result with the electric chair, which has gone horrifically wrong on many occasions. Old Sparky covers the history of capital punishment in America and the “current wars” between Edison and Westinghouse that led to the development of the electric chair. It examines how the electric chair became the most popular method of execution in America before being superseded by lethal injection. Famous executions are explored, alongside quirky last meals and poignant last words. The death penalty remains a hot topic of debate in America, and Old Sparky does not shy away from that controversy. Executions have gone spectacularly wrong, with convicts being set alight or needing up to five jolts of electricity before dying. There have been terrible miscarriages of justice, and the death penalty has not been applied even-handedly. Historically, African Americans, the mentally challenged, and poor defendants have been likely to get the chair, an anomaly which led the Supreme Court to briefly suspend the death penalty. Since the resumption of capital punishment in 1976, Texas alone has executed more than five hundred prisoners, and death row is full.




The Child in the Electric Chair


Book Description

The tragic story of the killing of 14-year-old George Junius Stinney Jr., the youngest person executed in the United States during the twentieth century At 7:30 a.m. on June 16, 1944, George Junius Stinney Jr. was escorted by four guards to the death chamber. Wearing socks but no shoes, the 14-year-old Black boy walked with his Bible tucked under his arm. The guards strapped his slight, five-foot-one-inch frame into the electric chair. His small size made it difficult to affix the electrode to his right leg and the face mask, which was clearly too large, fell to the floor when the executioner flipped the switch. That day, George Stinney became, and today remains, the youngest person executed in the United States during the twentieth century. How was it possible, even in Jim Crow South Carolina, for a child to be convicted, sentenced to death, and executed based on circumstantial evidence in a trial that lasted only a few hours? Through extensive archival research and interviews with Stinney's contemporaries—men and women alive today who still carry distinctive memories of the events that rocked the small town of Alcolu and the entire state—Eli Faber pieces together the chain of events that led to this tragic injustice. The first book to fully explore the events leading to Stinney's death, The Child in the Electric Chair offers a compelling narrative with a meticulously researched analysis of the world in which Stinney lived—the era of lynching, segregation, and racist assumptions about Black Americans. Faber explains how a systemically racist system, paired with the personal ambitions of powerful individuals, turned a blind eye to human decency and one of the basic tenets of the American legal system that individuals are innocent until proven guilty. As society continues to grapple with the legacies of racial injustice, the story of George Stinney remains one that can teach us lessons about our collective past and present. By ably placing the Stinney case into a larger context, Faber reveals how this case is not just a travesty of justice locked in the era of the Jim Crow South but rather one that continues to resonate in our own time. A foreword is provided by Carol Berkin, Presidential Professor of History Emerita at Baruch College at the City University of New York and author of several books including Civil War Wives: The Lives and Times of Angelina Grimke Weld, Varina Howell Davis, and Julia Dent Grant.




A Lesson Before Dying


Book Description

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A deep and compassionate novel about a young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to visit a Black youth on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting. "An instant classic." —Chicago Tribune A “majestic, moving novel...an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives" (Chicago Tribune), from the critically acclaimed author of A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. "A Lesson Before Dying reconfirms Ernest J. Gaines's position as an important American writer." —Boston Globe "Enormously moving.... Gaines unerringly evokes the place and time about which he writes." —Los Angeles Times “A quietly moving novel [that] takes us back to a place we've been before to impart a lesson for living.” —San Francisco Chronicle




Dead Man Walking


Book Description

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A profoundly moving spiritual journey through our system of capital punishment and an unprecedented look at the human consequences of the death penalty • "Stunning moral clarity.” —The Washington Post Book World • Basis for the award-winning major motion picture starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn "Sister Prejean is an excellent writer, direct and honest and unsentimental. . . . She almost palpably extends a hand to her readers.” —The New York Times Book Review In 1982, Sister Helen Prejean became the spiritual advisor to Patrick Sonnier, the convicted killer of two teenagers who was sentenced to die in the electric chair of Louisiana’s Angola State Prison. In the months before Sonnier’s death, the Roman Catholic nun came to know a man who was as terrified as he had once been terrifying. She also came to know the families of the victims and the men whose job it was to execute—men who often harbored doubts about the rightness of what they were doing. Out of that dreadful intimacy comes a profoundly moving spiritual journey through our system of capital punishment. Here Sister Helen confronts both the plight of the condemned and the rage of the bereaved, the fears of a society shattered by violence and the Christian imperative of love. On its original publication in 1993, Dead Man Walking emerged as an unprecedented look at the human consequences of the death penalty. Now, some two decades later, this story—which has inspired a film, a stage play, an opera and a musical album—is more gut-wrenching than ever, stirring deep and life-changing reflection in all who encounter it.




Let the Lord Sort Them


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A deeply reported, searingly honest portrait of the death penalty in Texas—and what it tells us about crime and punishment in America “If you’re one of those people who despair that nothing changes, and dream that something can, this is a story of how it does.”—Anand Giridharadas, The New York Times Book Review WINNER OF THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS AWARD In 1972, the United States Supreme Court made a surprising ruling: the country’s death penalty system violated the Constitution. The backlash was swift, especially in Texas, where executions were considered part of the cultural fabric, and a dark history of lynching was masked by gauzy visions of a tough-on-crime frontier. When executions resumed, Texas quickly became the nationwide leader in carrying out the punishment. Then, amid a larger wave of criminal justice reform, came the death penalty’s decline, a trend so durable that even in Texas the punishment appears again close to extinction. In Let the Lord Sort Them, Maurice Chammah charts the rise and fall of capital punishment through the eyes of those it touched. We meet Elsa Alcala, the orphaned daughter of a Mexican American family who found her calling as a prosecutor in the nation’s death penalty capital, before becoming a judge on the state’s highest court. We meet Danalynn Recer, a lawyer who became obsessively devoted to unearthing the life stories of men who committed terrible crimes, and fought for mercy in courtrooms across the state. We meet death row prisoners—many of them once-famous figures like Henry Lee Lucas, Gary Graham, and Karla Faye Tucker—along with their families and the families of their victims. And we meet the executioners, who struggle openly with what society has asked them to do. In tracing these interconnected lives against the rise of mass incarceration in Texas and the country as a whole, Chammah explores what the persistence of the death penalty tells us about forgiveness and retribution, fairness and justice, history and myth. Written with intimacy and grace, Let the Lord Sort Them is the definitive portrait of a particularly American institution.




The Execution of Willie Francis


Book Description

The inspiration behind "A Lesson Before Dying" meets the best of John Grisham as a young Cajun lawyer fights to save a black teenager from the electric chair. 16-page b&w photo insert.




Living on Death Row


Book Description

PROSE Award Finalist for Psychology This book synthesizes scholarly reflections with personal accounts from prison administrators and inmates to show the harsh reality of life on death row.




The Case That Shocked the Country


Book Description

The Case that Shocked the Country: The Unquiet deaths of Vida Robare, and Alexander McClay Williams -- the youngest person to die in the electric chair in Pennsylvania -- for a crime he did not commit, recounts an actual 1930 murder case in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. This stunning story sent shockwaves across the country as it flashed across newspaper headlines as far away as Texas, California, and Canada. It is a compelling combination of legal history, a real life murder mystery, and a 30 year quest for justice for a long forgotten 16 year old African American youth buried in an unmarked grave, who remains the youngest known person, to date, to die in Pennsylvania's electric chair. On Friday afternoon, October 3, 1930, the lifeless body of a popular white school matron was discovered in her bedroom covered in blood. The victim had sustained a brutal beating and was stabbed 47 times with an ice pick. There were no witnesses to the crime and scant evidence, except for the victim's missing key ring and the bloody handprint of an adult male left on the wallpaper by the door of her room, as her killer made his escape. Four days later, at what was then a tough reform school originally founded in Philadelphia, 16 year old Alexander McClay Williams - the eldest in an impoverished family of 13 children - "confessed" to the crime after repeated interrogations under undocumented circumstances, conducted without his parents or an attorney present in the room. Nearly three weeks after the learning disabled teenager signed not one, but three, confessions, the court appointed the county's only African America attorney - William Henry Ridley, Esq. (1867 - 1945) - to represent the youth. But his fate seemed already set. At the zenith of a remarkable 54-year career as a practicing attorney, Ridley would face insurmountable challenges with just two months to prepare a defense in his young client's capital murder case. How could Ridley overcome the stark realities of three dubious confessions, tampered evidence, a biased legal system, and an all-white jury that was understandably aghast at perhaps the most horrendous crime in county memory? Decades after his client was buried in an unmarked grave in a now abandoned cemetery, something curious happened. While living in the Ridley family's home when he was just a boy, the author first learned of this tragic story from his grandmother - the only child of William H. Ridley. Hearing the story left an indelible impression, which he could never forget. And the grisly tale continued to haunt him for decades as he grew into adulthood. As time wore on, the author began to look deeper into the case, digging down to uncover long lost evidence hidden beneath many layers of conflicting details and discrepancies. After gathering a volume of information and examining court documents and countless news articles, what he found shocked him, as it had shocked the country in 1930. He discovered that the frightened teenager who died in the electric chair did not commit the crime, and the real murderer escaped without facing punishment. The case of Alexander McClay Williams is a cautionary tale of what can result when systemic racism taints the criminal justice system, as the dynamics of this case are as crucial and applicable today as they were when these events unfolded 87 years ago. This book is a must read for those interested in the law, capital punishment, juvenile justice, African American history, and how the descendants of three seemingly unrelated families intertwined to try to overturn a monumental injustice for the last surviving sibling of Alexander McClay Williams.