The Hangman's Knot: Lynching, Legal Execution, And America's Struggle With The Death Penalty. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.The Hangman's Knot: Lynching, Legal Execution, And America's Struggle With The Death Penalty

Public executions were once commonplace American spectacles. In one instance, Puritan clergymen convicted and executed nineteen people for the "crime" of witchcraft. On the other side of the country many years later, San Francisco's city fathers held "official" vigilante hangings. But today, executions are rigidly controlled bureaucratic procedures authorized by the state. In The Hangman's Knot: Lynching, Legal Execution, and America's Struggle with the Death Penalty, Eliza Steelwater presents a fascinating history of execution in the United States, from colonial times to the present. With a compelling narrative and gripping personal stories, she documents how this debate became one of the most contentious of our time. The author, a veteran death-penalty researcher and co-founder of Project HAL (Historical American Lynching), shows that the answer to the death penalty's future lies in a discussion of its past. Using information from Project HAL and the authoritative Capital Punishment Research Project - including records of over 15,000 legal executions and 4,500 lynchings nationwide - Steelwater delivers a vivid understanding that America's unparalleled and powerful 200-year-old policy of execution as "punishment politics" is alive and well today. Bringing a fresh perspective to the death-penalty debate, she demonstrates that execution has often had less to do with crimes committed than with the political and economic ambitions of those who controlled the punishment system.

Eliza Steelwater, a native of New Orleans, has researched and written about capital punishment for fifteen years, since receiving a four-year Alumni Federation doctoral fellowship to study at Louisiana State University. One of her study sites was the nearby and infamous Angola penitentiary. She is the co-founder of Project HAL, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to collect and provide information about lynchings and legal executions, with the goal of one day eradicating them. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana.