From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State - Race and the Death Penalty in America (Paperback)

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

aExpertly dissects the racist underpinnings of capital punishment while pushing some intellectual boundaries.a
--"International Socialist Review"

aThe authors give the nation an unflinching view of the shameful influence of racism in death penalty cases. This is a must read for anyone who cares about fairness in application of the death penalty and respect for the rule of law in our modern society.a
--Senator Edward M. Kennedy

aOgeltree and Sarat combine the most severe criminal punishment with the bugaboo of racial class and prejudice in their book From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State. The professors astutely note that the death penalty is often used as a club to keep poor and desperate minorities in line in the larger white society.a
--"Black Issues Book Review"

aAn elegant compendium of essays written by sociologists, historians, criminologists, and lawyers. The essays starkly reveal how this countryas death penalty has its roots in lynchings, and how it operates to sustain a racist agenda.a
--"The Federal Lawyer"

"This book offers thoughtful and wide-ranging assessments of how America's most dramatic punishment intersects with America's deepest and most divisive social problem. These essays go far beyond the obvious and offer much of interest both for those with a particular interest in the death penalty and for those who seek to understand and to ameliorate our country's shameful legacy of racial inequality. This is the rare book that will be helpful to the student, the scholar, and the activist alike."
--Carol Steiker, Harvard Law School

"Essential reading for all who are seeking to understand thecontemporary American death penalty or to imagine an America without one."
--Jonathan Simon, School of Law-Boalt Hall, University of California, Berkeley

"A major contribution."
--Randy A. Hertz, NYU School of Law

"Riveting and very timely. Remarkably, the book creatively assembles social history, demographic and statistical analysis, experimental psychology, and legal history and finds a common truth: the death penalty may be one of the most persistent, self-reinforcing ways we uphold racial division."
--Robert Weisberg, Stanford University Law School

"The book is bound to influence the thinking of many who tolerate if not actively support the death penalty because of the way it shows how deeply entrenched are the shameful racist attitudes and practices in our nation's dominant (white) culture."
--Hugo Adam Bedau, editor of "The Death Penalty in America"

"This is the first recent volume to address race and capital punishment in such a broad, systematic, and--perhaps most importantly--multi-disciplinary fashion."
--David R. Dow, University of Houston Law Center

Since 1976, over forty percent of prisoners executed in American jails have been African American or Hispanic. This trend shows little evidence of diminishing, and follows a larger pattern of the violent criminalization of African American populations that has marked the country's history of punishment.

In a bold attempt to tackle the looming question of how and why the connection between race and the death penalty has been so strong throughout American history, Ogletree and Sarat headline an interdisciplinary cast of experts in reflecting on this disturbing issue. Insightful original essaysapproach the topic from legal, historical, cultural, and social science perspectives to show the ways that the death penalty is racialized, the places in the death penalty process where race makes a difference, and the ways that meanings of race in the United States are constructed in and through our practices of capital punishment.

From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State not only uncovers the ways that race influences capital punishment, but also attempts to situate the linkage between race and the death penalty in the history of this country, in particular the history of lynching. In its probing examination of how and why the connection between race and the death penalty has been so strong throughout American history, this book forces us to consider how the death penalty gives meaning to race as well as why the racialization of the death penalty is uniquely American.