A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America
For 200 years, capital punishment had been widely accepted and assumed constitutional, until a U.S. Supreme Court justice raised the issue of cruel and unusual punishment. In 1962, Justice Arthur Goldberg and his clerk, Alan Dershowitz, launched a campaign to argue that the death penalty was a violation of the Eighth Amendment. They were ultimately joined by the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, earning a victory in 1972 when the Supreme Court struck down Georgia’s death penalty law and toppling similar laws in the other 40 states with capital punishment. States responded with mandatory sentencing until 1976, when Robert Bork successfully argued for reinstatement and the court reversed itself. Legal scholar Mandery spent four years researching archives and interviewing law clerks and litigators to offer a dramatic, behind-the-scenes look at the long, slow journey to get the issue heard, its success, and the journey to reversal of judgment. He portrays the complex personalities behind the arguments on both sides and a court as sensitive to political tides as moral and philosophical concerns on an issue that continues to remain controversial. --Vanessa Bush