Capital Punishment: A Select Bibliography



Capital Punishment: A Select Bibliography

Patrick S. O’Donnell

Department of Philosophy

Santa Barbara City College (2012)

The web site for research on capital punishment is the Death Penalty Information Center:



Acker, James R. et al., eds. America’s Experiment with Capital Punishment: Reflections on the

Past, Present and Future of the Ultimate Penal Sanction. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1998.

Allen, Howard W. and Jerome C. Clubb. Race, Class, and the Death Penalty: Capital Punishment in American History. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008.

Bae, Sangmin. When the State No Longer Kills: International Human Rights Norms and Abolition of Capital Punishment. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007.

Baldwin, Robert L. Life and Death Matters: Seeking the Truth about Capital Punishment. Montgomery. AL: NewSouth Books, 2009.

Banner, Stuart. The Death Penalty: An American History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Baumgartner, Frank R., Suzanna L. De Boef, and Amber E. Boydstun, eds. The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Bedau, Hugo Adam. Death is Different: Studies in the Morality, Law, and Politics of Capital

Punishment. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1987.

Bedau, Hugo Adam, ed. The Death Penalty in America: Current Controversies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Bedau, Hugo Adam and Paul G. Cassell, eds. Debating the Death Penalty: Should America have Capital Punishment? New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Berger, Raoul. Death Penalties: The Supreme Court’s Obstacle Course. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Berns, Walter. For Capital Punishment: Crime and the Morality of the Death Penalty. New York: Basic Books, 1979.

Bessler, John D. Death in the Dark: Midnight Executions in America. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1997.

Bessler, John D. Cruel and Unusual: The American Death Penalty and the Founders’ Eighth Amendment. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2012.

Black, Charles L. Jr. Capital Punishment: The Inevitability of Caprice and Mistake. New York:

W.W. Norton, 2nd ed., 1981.

Bohm, Robert M. Ultimate Sanction: Understanding the Death Penalty Through its Many Voices and many Sides. New York: Kaplan Publishing, 2010.

Bohm, Robert M. DeathQuest: An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Capital Punishment in the United States. Waltham, MA: Anderson Publishing (Elsevier), 4th ed., 2012.

Bonner, Raymond. Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.

Brown, Edmund (Pat). Public Justice, Private Mercy: A Governor’s Education on Death Row. New York: Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, 1989.

Brugger, E. Christian. Capital Punishment and Roman Catholic Moral Tradition. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003.

Burnett, Cathleen. Justice Denied: Clemency Appeals in Death Penalty Cases. Boston, MA:

Northeastern University Press, 2002.

Cabana, Donald. Death at Midnight: The Confession of an Executioner. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1996.

Cahill, Thomas. A Saint on Death Row: The Story of Dominique Green. New York: Doubleday, 2009.

Carter, Dan T. Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2nd ed., 1979.

Christianson, Scott. Condemned: Inside the Sing Sing Death House. New York: New York

University Press, 2000.

Christianson, Scott. The Last Gasp: The Rise and Fall of the American Gas Chamber. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010.

Cohen, Stanley. The Wrong Men: America’s Epidemic of Wrongful Death Row Convictions. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003.

Costanzo, Mark. Just Revenge: Costs and Consequences of the Death Penalty. New York: St.

Martin’s Press, 1997.

Coyne, Randall and Lyn Entzeroth. Capital Punishment and the Judicial Process. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 3rd ed., 2006.

Dicks, Shirley, ed. Congregation of the Condemned: Voices Against the Death Penalty. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991.

Dow, David R. Executed on a Technicality: Lethal Injustice on America’s Death Row. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2005.

Dow, David R. The Autobiography of an Execution. New York: Twelve/Hachette Book Group, 2010.

Elder, Robert K. Last Words of the Executed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Fleury-Steiner, Benjamin. Jurors’ Stories of Death: How America’s Death Penalty Invests in Inequality. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004.

Friedland, Paul. Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in France. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Garland, David. Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010.

Garvey, Stephen P., ed. Beyond Repair? America’s Death Penalty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

Gattrell, V.A.C. The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770-1868. Oxford, UK:

Oxford University Press, 1994.

Gerber, Rudolf J. and John M. Johnson. The Top Ten Death Penalty Myths: The Politics of Crime Control. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007.

Gorecki, Jan. Capital Punishment: Criminal Law and Social Evolution. New York: Columbia

University Press, 1983.

Gray. Mike. The Death Game: Capital Punishment and the Luck of the Draw. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2003.

Hammel, Andrew. Ending the Death Penalty: The European Experience in Global Perspective. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Haney, Craig. Death by Design: Capital Punishment as a Social Psychological System. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Hanks, Gardner C. Against the Death Penalty: Christian and Secular Arguments against Capital Punishment. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1997.

Hood, Roger G. The Death Penalty: A World-Wide Perspective. Oxford, UK: Clarendon

Press, 2nd ed., 1996.

Ingle, Joseph B. The Inferno: A Southern Morality Tale. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2012.

Jackson, Bruce and Diane Christian. In This Timeless Time: Living and Dying on Death Row in America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

Johnson, David T. and Franklin E. Zimring. The Next Frontier: National Development, Political Change and the Death Penalty in Asia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Johnson, Robert. Death Work: A Study of the Modern Execution Process. New York: Wadsworth, 1998.

Jones, Paul Christian. Against the Gallows: Antebellum American Writers and the Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment. Ames, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2011.

Kay, Judith W. Murdering Myths: The Story Behind the Death Penalty. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.

King, Gilbert. The Execution of Willie Francis: Race, Murder, and the Search for Justice in the American South. New York: Basic Civitas, 2008.

Koosed, Margery B., ed. Capital Punishment. 3 Vols. New York: Garland, 1996.

Kramer, Matthew H. The Ethics of Capital Punishment: A Philosophical Investigation of Evil and Its Consequences. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Lanier, Charles S., William J. Bowers and James R. Acker, eds. The Future of America’s Death Penalty: An Agenda for the Next Generation of Capital Punishment Research. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2009.

Lesser, Wendy. Pictures at an Execution: An Inquiry into the Subject of Murder. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Lifton, Robert J. and Greg Mitchell. Who Owns Death? Capital Punishment, the American Conscience, and the End of Executions. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.

Lu, Hong and Terance D. Miethe. China’s Death Penalty: History, Law, and Contemporary Practices. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Lyon, Andrea D. Angel of Death Row: My Life as a Death Penalty Defense Lawyer. New York: Kaplan, 2010.

Lytle, Leslie. Execution’s Doorstep: True Stories of the Innocent and Near Damned. Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press, 2008.

Madeira, Jody Lyneé. Killing McVeigh: The Death Penalty and the Myth of Closure. New York: New York University Press, 2012.

Marquart, James W. The Rope, the Chair, and the Needle: Capital Punishment in Texas, 1923- 1990. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Masters, Jarvis Jay. That Bird Has My Wings. New York: HarperCollins, 2009.

Mello, Michael A. Against the Death Penalty: The Relentless Dissents of Justices Brennan and Marshall. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1996.

Mello, Michael A. Dead Wrong: A Death Row Lawyer Speaks Out Against Capital Punishment. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

Mello, Michael. The Wrong Man: A True Story of Innocence on Death Row. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Meltsner, Michael. Cruel and Unusual: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment. New Orleans, LA: Quid Pro Books, 2011 ed. (1973).

Miller, Kent S. and Michael L. Radelet. Executing the Mentally Ill: The Criminal Justice System and the Case of Alvin Ford. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993.

Nakell, Barry. The Arbitrariness of the Death Penalty. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1987.

Nathanson, Stephen. An Eye for an Eye? The Immorality of Punishing by Death. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2nd ed., 2001.

Ogletree, Charles J., Jr. and Austin Sarat, eds. From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Ogletree, Charles J., Jr. and Austin Sarat, eds. The Road to Abolition? The Future of Capital Punishment in the United States. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

Ogletree, Charles J., Jr. and Austin Sarat, eds. Life Without Parole: America’s New Death Penalty? New York: New York University Press, 2012.

O’Shea, Kathleen A. Women and the Death Penalty in the United States, 1900-1998. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999.

Oshinsky, David M. Capital Punishment on Trial: Furman v. Georgia and the Death Penalty in Modern America. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010.

Owens, Erik C., John D. Carlson, and Eric P. Elshtain, eds. Religion and the Death Penalty: A Call for Reckoning. Detroit, MI. Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004.

Peppers, Todd C. and Laura Trevvett Anderson. Anatomy of an Execution: The Life and Death of Douglas Christopher Thomas. Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press, 2009.

Peters, Rudolph. Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law: Theory and Practice from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Pojman, Louis P. and Jeffrey Reiman. The Death Penalty: For and Against. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.

Pradervand, Pierre. Messages of Life from Death Row. BookSurge Publ., 2009.

Prejean, Sister Helen. Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the

United States. New York: Random House, 1993.

Prejean, Sister Helen. The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions. New York: Random House, 2005.

Radelet, Michael L., Hugo Adam Bedau and Constance E. Putnam. In Spite of Innocence:

Erroneous Convictions in Capital Cases. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press,

revised ed., 1994.

Recinella, Dale S. Now I Walk on Death Row. Bloomington, MN: Chosen Books, 2011.

Rideau, Wilbert. In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

Robinson, Matthew B. Death Nation: The Experts Explain American Capital Punishment. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2007.

Rogers, Allen. Murder and the Death Penalty in Massachusetts. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008.

Russell, Gregory D. The Death Penalty and Racial Bias: Overturning Supreme Court Assumptions.Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993.

Sarat, Austin. When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Sarat, Austin. Mercy on Trial: What It Means to Stop an Execution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Sarat, Austin, ed. The Killing State: Capital Punishment in Law, Politics, and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Schabas, William A. The Death Penalty As Cruel Treatment and Torture: Capital Punishment Challenged in the World’s Court. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1996.

Schabas, William A. The Abolition of the Death Penalty in International Law. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 3rd ed., 2002.

Scheck, Barry, Peter Neufeld and Jim Dwyer. Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted. New York: Doubleday, 2000.

Sorell, Tom. Moral Theory and Capital Punishment. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1987.

Steelwater, Eliza. The Hangman’s Knot: Lynching, Legal Execution and America’s Struggle with the Death Penalty. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003.

Steffen, Lloyd. Executing Justice: The Moral Meaning of the Death Penalty. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1998.

Sundby, Scott E. A Life and Death Decision: A Jury Weighs the Death Penalty. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Temple, John. The Last Lawyer: The Fight to Save Death Row Inmates. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.

Trombley, Stephen. The Execution Protocol: Inside America’s Capital Punishment Industry. New York: Crown, 1992.

Turow, Scott. Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer’s Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003.

von Drehle, David. Among the Lowest of the Dead: The Culture of Death Row. New York: Random House, 1995.

Welsh-Huggins, Andrew. No Winners Here Tonight: Race, Politics, and Geography in One of the Country’s Busiest Death Penalty States. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2009.

White, Welsh S. The Death Penalty in the Nineties: An Examination of the Modern System of Capital Punishment. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1991.

White, Welsh S. Litigating in the Shadow of Death: Defense Attorneys in Capital Cases. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005.

Williams, Kenneth. Most Deserving of Death? An Analysis of the Supreme Court’s Death Penalty Jurisprudence. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012.

Zimring, Franklin E. The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Zimring, Franklin E. and Gordon Hawkins. Capital Punishment and the American Agenda.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

See too the bibliography for “Criminal Law, Punishment & Prisons.”

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