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Capital Punishment: An Indictment by a Death-Row Survivor

"In this critical new work, Billy Wayne Sinclair and Jodie Sinclair examine the death penalty from ancient history — an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth — to the latest U.S. Supreme Court decisions." "Billy Wayne Sinclair was just twenty-one years old when he heard a Louisiana judge say, "I hereby sentence you to death in the electric chair," a penalty resulting from a botched convenience store holdup in which Billy accidentally shot and killed a man. When, in its landmark 1972 Furman v. Georgia ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the death penalty as "capricious and arbitrary," Billy's sentence was automatically commuted to life in prison, along with those of hundreds of other death-row inmates. He spent forty years in the Louisiana penal system, including twenty years in Angola prison, one of the country's worst — six of those years on death row. After defeating fathomless depression, he took up the law and soon became a respected jailhouse lawyer. He not only helped to integrate the still segregated Angola prison but also exposed rampant corruption within the jail itself and among the state's high-ranking politicians." Many states — led by Texas, Georgia, and Florida — reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Today some 3,300 men and women await their fate on death row. Informed by firsthand experience of death row and decades of study, Capital Punishment offers vital information about, and insight into, a subject as heated and contentious today as it ever was.

  • Format
  • hardcover
  • Pages
  • 246
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781559708999
  • Genres
  • politics
  • Release date
  • 2009