The Death Penalty: An American History by Stuart Banner
This is a comprehensive history of the death penalty in America. It is divided into ten chapters, which are in overlapping chronological order by subject. The first chapter looks at the reasons that the early colonists had for hanging people and the attitudes of the colonists towards hanging and the hanged.
The second chapter describes hanging day.
The third chapter describes some early alternatives to the death sentence, such as putting a person of the gallows, going through the ceremony done before a hanging, and then pardoning the prisoner.
The fourth chapter describes early abolitionist sentiment(abolitionist in this book refers to opponents of the death penalty).
The fifth chapter compares the attitudes of northerners and southerners to the death penalty.
The sixth chapter tells of the changes caused by moving the gallows into the jail yards.
The seventh chapter details the changes in the instruments of death; technology allowed for the electric chair and the gas chamber.
The eighth chapter reports the decline in American usage of the death penalty that took place from the nineteenth century until the 1970s.
The ninth chapter describes the Supreme Court's intervention with death penalty, on the grounds of the Eighth Amendment(No cruel and unusual punishment).
The last chapter is the affects of the Supreme Court's decisions' how the Court's decision backfired on abolishionists and left leeway for the death penalty's "resurrection".
This book is a well written history of the death penalty. It does not have a strong enough bias in favor of or opposed to the death penalty to bother a reader with either sentiment, unless the reader insists on extreme agreement with his own view. There is a slight bias in that Banner speaks more of Missouri than of the other states, because Missouri is his home state.
Happy reading.(Unless the death penalty really excites you, in which case, I'll have to wish you a Thoughtful reading.)
