Invitation to an execution
Subtitle: a history of the death penalty in the United States
By: edited by Gordon Morris Bakken
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Albuquerque
Language: eng
Number of pages: 467
ISBN-13: 9780826348562
Subjects: States; History; Capital punishment; Executions and executioners
Description: "Until the early twentieth century, printed invitations to executions issued by lawmen were a vital part of the ritual of death concluding a criminal proceeding in the United States. In this study, the author invites readers to an understanding of the death penalty in America with a collection of essays that trace the history and politics of this highly charged moral, legal, and cultural issue. Bakken has solicited essays from historians, political scientists, and lawyers to ensure a broad treatment of the evolution of American cultural attitudes about crime and capital punishment. Part one of this extensive analysis focuses on politics, legal history, multicultural issues, and the international aspects of the death penalty. Part two offers a regional analysis with essays that put death penalty issues into a geographic and cultural context. Part three focuses on specific states with emphasis on the need to understand capital punishment in terms of state law development, particularly because states determine on whom the death penalty will be imposed. Part four examines the various means of death, from hanging to lethal injection, in state law case studies. And finally, part five focuses on the portrayal of capital punishment in popular culture"--Publisher.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Invitation to an execution / Gordon Morris Bakken; title: Politics and capital punishment: the role of judicial, legislative, and executive decisions in the practice of death / Stacy L. Mallicoat; title: Conflicts of interest: business, death, and the bird court / Michael A. Pierson; title: Fear, capital punishment, and order: the construction and use of capital punishment statutes in early modern England and seventeenth-century New England / Patrick Callaway; title: Murder most foul: Native Americans and the evolution of the death penalty / Vanessa Gunther; title: The death penalty in federal law / Lonnie Wilson; title: Ovines and bovines / Ion Puschila; title: Amnesty International and the death penalty: toward global abolition / Alexander Karn; title: The celluloid execution: Hollywood films and capital punishment / Susanne Teepe Gaskins; title: The death penalty in the south / Michael A. Powell; title: The death penalty in the north / Dino E. Buenviaje; title: The death penalty in the Midwest / Melody M. Miyamoto, Charles W. Showalter; title: The death penalty in the great plains / John Gregory Jacobsen; title: The death penalty in the Pacific Northwest / Joseph Laythe; title: To do no harm: medicine and the death penalty in England and Texas / Norwood Andrews; title: Means of death: methods of execution in California, 1937-2007 / Thomas Bojorquez; title: Capital punishment and executions in Montana / Ellen Baumler; title: The death penalty in Arizona and New Mexico / Daniel Stackhouse; title: Arkansas and Missouri: the death penalty / Timothy R. Finch; title: Capital punishment and corporal punishment in the California gold mines / Andrea McDowell; title: Vigilantism during the Gold Rush / Mary Marki, Christopher Clayton Smith; title: The death penalty in California: 1857-1970 / Susan Sanchez-Barnett; title: Capital punishment suggested reading / Catherine Kaye.