The executive director of a social advocacy group that has helped relieve condemned prisoners explains why justice and mercy must go hand-in-hand through the story of Walter McMillian, a man condemned to death row for a murder he didn't commit.

A Catholic nun shares her unique perspective of the death penalty gained through her counseling of death-row inmates

Explores America's uneasy relationshsip with capital punishment from colonial days through Illinois Governor George Ryan's commutation of the sentences of 164 death row inmates before he left office in 2003.

Hurricane recounts the harrowing, inspiring odyssey of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a black boxer wrongly convicted of three murders, from fierce despair to freedom and enlightenment On June 17, 1966, two black men strode into the Lafayette Grill, a white redoubt in racially mixed Paterson, New Jersey, and shot three people to death. Rubin Carter and his young acquaintance John Artis were not those men, but they were convicted of the murders in a highly...

David Gale was an active member of Deathwatch, an anti-capital punishment activist group. Constance is a fellow Deathwatch activist. When Constance is found raped and murdered, Gale is convicted of the crime. Now Gale awaits execution, and with less than a week before his date with the fatal injection, Gale agrees to tell his story to Bitsy, a nervy journalist from a major newsmagazine. As she discusses the facts of the murder with Gale, it occurs...

Paternoster et al. present a balanced perspective that focuses on both the arguments for and against capital punishment. Coverage draws on legal, historical, philosophical, economic, sociological, and religious points of view.

Raises constitutional questions about the legality of the death penalty and reveals how race, poverty, publicity, and prosecutorial ambition can determine who lives and dies after a murder conviction.