Execution's Doorstep: True Stories of the Innocent and Near Damned

by Leslie Lytle

Overview

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-1970s, 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 protect us are fallible and subject to the same incompetencies, petty corruptions,and politicizations to which 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?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555536787
Publisher:	Northeastern University Press
Publication date:	11/01/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

LESLIE LYTLE has an M.A. from Antioch University and serves on the board of the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing, as a staff writer for the community newspaper Sewanee Mountain Messenger, and as editor of Local Action and Beyond, the journal of the Cumberland Center for Justice and Peace. She was recently appointed the Center's executive director.

Table of Contents

Introduction Glossary of Context-Specific Death-Penalty Terms Ron Keine Juan Roberto Melendez Michael Ray Graham, Jr.
Madison Hobley Randal Padgett Conclusion Appendix: States Paying Restitution for Wrongful Convictions in Capital Cases Acknowledgments Notes Index

What People are Saying About This

Sister Helen Prejean

"Wonder how it could be that 126 wrongly convicted people on death row have been exonerated? What's wrong with our court system? Here's a promise: if you accompany Ms. Lytle into these five stories you'll not only "get it," you may be moved to join our efforts to change it."
— Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking and Death of Innocents

Editorial Reviews

Journalist Lytle brings the capital punishment debate into sharp focus with her account of five men wrongly convicted and sentenced to death but later freed. The men, Lytle shows, were victims of false testimony and police coercion, among other ills of the justice system, and served up to 17 years in prison-much of it on death row. Michael Graham remained on death row for 14 years for the murder of en elderly couple before the key witness admitted fabricating her testimony. Madison Hobley, beaten and coerced into confessing to a deadly arson, spent 13 years on death row before he was pardoned. Randal Padgett, accused of raping and murdering his wife, was imprisoned for five and a half years-three and a half on death row-before he was granted a new trial and acquitted. Drawing on court documents and extensive interviews with the death row survivors, Lytle shines light on the often overlooked hardships these men face in returning to society after spending years in a six-by-nine-foot cell. (Nov.)

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