At the start of the twenty-first century, America is in the midst of a profound national reconsideration of the death penalty. There has been a dramatic decline in the number of people being sentenced to death as well as executed, exonerations have become common, and the number of states abolishing the death penalty is on the rise. The essays featured in The Road to Abolition? track this shift in attitudes toward capital punishment, and consider whether or not the death penalty will ever be abolished in America.
The interdisciplinary group of experts gathered by Charles J. Ogletree Jr., and Austin Sarat ask and attempt to answer the hard questions that need to be addressed if the death penalty is to be abolished. Will the death penalty end only to be replaced with life in prison without parole? Will life without the possibility of parole become, in essence, the new death penalty? For abolitionists, might that be a pyrrhic victory? The contributors discuss how the death penalty might be abolished, with particular emphasis on the current debate over lethal injection as a case study on why and how the elimination of certain forms of execution might provide a model for the larger abolition of the death penalty.
Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. (Editor) Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. is the Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. He is the author of All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education (WW Norton and Company, 2004) and Co-Author of From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America.
Austin Sarat (Editor) Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He has written or edited dozens of books, including Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Humane Execution, Law's Infamy: Understanding the Canon of Bad Law, and Cause Lawyering: Political Commitments and Professional Responsibilities and Cause Lawyering and the State in a Global Era, which won the 2004 Reginald Heber Smith Book Award.
Acknowledgments Introduction Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., and Austin Sarat Part I 1 The Executioner’s Waning Defenses Michael L. Radelet 2 Blinded by Science on the Road to Abolition? Simon A. Cole and Jay D. Aronson 3 Abolition in the United States by 2050: On Political Capital and Ordinary Acts of Resistance Bernard E. Harcourt 4 The Beginning of the End? Carol S. Steiker and Jordan M. Steiker 5 Rocked but Still Rolling: The Enduring Institution of Capital Punishment in Historical and Comparative Perspective Michael McCann and David T. Johnson Part II 6 For Execution Methods Challenges, the Road to Abolition Is Paved with Paradox Deborah W. Denno 7 Perfect Execution: Abolitionism and the Paradox of Lethal Injection Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn 8 “No Improvement over Electrocution or Even a Bullet”: Lethal Injection and the Meaning of Speed and Reliability in the Modern Execution Process Jürgen Martschukat Part III 9 Torture, War, and Capital Punishment: Linkages and Missed Connections Robin Wagner-Pacifici 10 Making Difference: Modernity and the Political Formations of Death Peter Fitzpatrick About the Contributors Index
