The Slow Death of the Death Penalty
Toward a Postmortem
Mary Welek Atwell editor Todd C Peppers editor Jamie Almallen editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:New York University Press
Publishing:1st Jul '25
£27.99
This title is due to be published on 1st July, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Why the death penalty is in decline across the United States
Across the country, the death penalty is dying. Twenty-two states have abandoned state-sanctioned executions, including nine in the last fifteen years. Of the twenty-eight states that still have the death penalty, eight have not had an execution in over a decade. And public support for the death penalty has declined from 80% of the surveyed population in the early 1990s to approximately 50% today.
As the death penalty slowly withers away, Todd C. Peppers, Jamie Almallen, and Mary Welek Atwell bring together a number of distinguished death-penalty scholars, activists, and attorneys to take an accounting of the damage inflicted by the machinery of death. Contributors to the book point to a range of different pathologies which have caused politicians and voters to turn against capital punishment, from unacceptable rates of false convictions and racially motivated prosecutions, to a clemency process poisoned by political factors.
Essay topics include various dimensions of the death penalty, including racial and gender bias; economic costs; the conviction of juveniles, the mentally ill, and the factually innocent; Supreme Court decisions; and the failure of the death penalty to serve as a deterrent against crime. This important volume is an up-to-date accounting of the current state and, as the contributors argue, the future demise of the death penalty.
ISBN: 9781479819645
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
384 pages