Capital punishment
Subtitle: an indictment by a death-row survivor
By: Billy Wayne Sinclair.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Arcade Pub.; Arcade Publishing
Published: 2009
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 264
ISBN-13: 9781559708999
Subjects: Sinclair, Billy Wayne, -- 1945-; Capital punishment -- United States; Death row inmates -- United States
Description: Billy Wayne Sinclair was only 21 when he heard the Louisiana judge pronounce these words: "I hereby sentence you to death in the electric chair." It was the culmination of a botched holdup committed the year before in which Billy had accidentally shot and killed a man. Billy spent the next 40 years in Angola Prison, one of the country's worst, six of those years on death row. When in 1972 the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty as arbitrary and capricious, Billy was re-sentenced to life without parole. Finally released in 2006, he now examines the death penalty in great detail, from ancient history--an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth--to the present. Informed by his own experience and his decades-long studies, this book offers important information about, and insights into, a subject that is as heated and controversial today as it ever was.--Publisher description.
Table of contents: title: Death row redux; title: Death : whim and caprice; title: Surviving death row; title: The death cocktail; title: A slow agonizing death; title: Mistakes in last-minute death appeals; title: Two cases of innocence; title: Another Texas DNA exoneration; title: The killers of women; title: The crime victim movement and the death penalty; title: Youth violence and the death penalty; title: The saga of Louisiana's first post-Furman execution.