CAPITAL PUNISHMENT AND THE AMERICAN AGENDA

Hardback. Foreword by Tom Wicker. The death penalty is not simply the most serious criminal punishment. It has been a singular social, legal, and moral problem in the Western world over the previous 200 plus years. Capital punishment was disappearing from every nation in the West except the United States. At time of publication, with 1,700 prisoners on death row throughout the country and the prospect of accelerating execution rates, significant decisions on the future of the death penalty needed to be taken in America. No political science of capital punishment in the United States had been attempted until this book. The authors offer a re-examination of the whole subject in the light of the social, political and moral conditions of the United States in the 1980s, and a re-definition of the central political and legal issues. Lawyers, criminologists, political scientists, and motivated general readers will find the profile of a United States pursuing an active execution policy in the 1980s and 1990s to be an original and compelling contribution to the discussion of the future of the death penalty. The authors prediction for future policy, while based on historic precedent, was in sharp contrast to conventional wisdom about the United States Supreme Court. Part I: The Road to 1987; Part II: Futures and Consequences. With Appendix and Index. 192pp. 8vo. h/back. With signs of b/plate removal to fpd o/w Nr. F. in F. protected dw.