Execution's doorstep
Subtitle: true stories of the innocent and near damned
By: Leslie Lytle.
Publisher: Northeastern University Press; Published by University Press of New England
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Boston; Hanover [N.H.]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 278
ISBN-13: 9781555536787
Subjects: Trials (Murder) -- United States; Judicial error -- United States; Compensation for judicial error -- United States; Death row inmates -- United States -- Biography
Genres: Biography.
Description: Execution’s Doorstep tells the true stories of five lives trapped in a living nightmare: sentenced to die for a crime they didn’t commit. Since capital punishment was reinstated in the mid 1970’s, over 120 individuals have been proven wholly innocent of the crimes for which they were sentenced to death. But this statistic, as horrifying as it is, does not begin to tell the whole story. Leslie Lytle confronts the human suffering behind these miscarriages of justice in her effort to reveal how and why they occurred. Drawing on extensive interviews and archival research, Lytle guides the reader through the fateful crimes, the arrests, the trials, the incarcerations, the struggles to prove innocence, and the difficult readjustments to life in the free world. Execution’s Doorstep is more than a gripping human-interest story. As Lytle shows, the criminal justice and capital punishment systems that we have established to promote an ethical society are fallible; subject to the same, incompetencies, petty corruptions, and politicizations that all human institutions are prone. As we relive these heart-rending stories of innocents damned, this book poses a simple question: can we trust the life and death of any man to a system run by men?
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Ron Keine; title: Juan Robert Melendez; title: Michael Ray Graham, jr; title: Madison Hobley; title: Randal Padgett.