Legal Lynching

Mario Cuomo

[A] powerful argument against a reversion to barbarism and for a return to reasonableness.

Publishers Weekly

In this collaborative work, the Jacksons, father (former presidential candidate and founder of the Rainbow Coalition) and son (a congressional representative) with Salon.com editor Shapiro, pursue a nationwide conversation on the issues surrounding the death penalty one that begins with the proposal of a moratorium and could lead to the eventual cessation of capital punishment. This book describes a bureaucratic nightmare involving defense lawyers asleep at trial, vengeance-hungry politicos and a problematic, imperfect justice system in which the handing out of death sentences is skewed, both racially and economically. An objective examination of this penal system would be beneficial to all, say the authors: since the Supreme Court allowed executions to resume in 1976, one in every eight prisoners on death row has been found innocent and released. There are undoubtedly cases, the authors argue, where the proof of innocence didn't see the light of day in time. Navigating the historical precedents of the death penalty and the reasons why federally mandated executions were restored following a 10-year moratorium imposed in 1967, the authors thoroughly detail legitimate questions regarding what they view as erroneous deterrence theories, scriptural misrepresentation and simple vengeance. "Today's executions are exercises in the engineering of death, the institutionalizing of death, the bureaucratizing of death," they conclude. This will be a must-read for anti-death penalty advocates, who may find the arguments familiar but forcefully put. Their effective presentation might give pause even to those who believe executions are justified. 12 b&w photos not seen by PW. (Oct.) Forecast: A hotpolitical topic and high-visibility father-and-son authors guarantee media attention for this that should generate at least an initial spike in sales. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Taking a more blood-and-guts approach, journalist Solotaroff goes behind the scenes and interviews the executioners who carry out the sentences. He concentrates on Parchman State Penitentiary in Mississippi and on two men, Donald Cabana, who quit his job as warden because he could not stomach the death penalty, and Donald Hocutt, who appears to relish his work yet suffers from a list of physical and psychological ailments. Solotaroff goes back to Parchman's early days as a plantation, to the early history of capital punishment in America, then on to the electric chair, the gas chamber, and lethal injection. His story is not for the fainthearted. Solotaroff does not argue directly against the death penalty but simply shows what it entails in its most bareknuckled form. The executioners' bravado and the mutilated bodies of the executed go hand in hand. While Legal Lynching should appeal to a wider audience, The Last Face You'll Ever See belongs in all crime collections, where it should stand out for its originality. Frances Sandiford, Green Haven Correctional Facility Lib., Stormville, NY Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A concise, well-reasoned argument against capital punishment. Presidential candidate and reformer Jackson Sr. is known for both political savvy and rhetorical excess. In the company of his son, a US congressman from Illinois, and Nation writer Shapiro, Jackson keeps his arguments at a moderate pitch that accords principled proponents of the death penalty a measure of respect-but that insists all the same that they're wrong, wrong, wrong. The authors approach their subject from several sides, touching on issues of morality, race, religion, and law. On the religious front, they argue that although the Bible seems divided on the matter of the death penalty, "human beings do not have the right, and should not be given the power, to take away what God has created"; on the matter of race, they observe that the death penalty is meted out disproportionately to African-Americans and other ethnic minorities; on the legal front, most practically of all, they question whether many courts are capable even of considering capital cases when nationwide budget crises have forced courts "to trim away resources required for equal justice to prevail." They hold that the arguments for killing killers are flawed; the supposed deterrent effect of the possibility of being put to death for crimes committed has done nothing to slow the rate of crime, they insist, while the states that most vigorously employ the death penalty are the ones whose rates of crime have been slowest to fall. That is especially true of Texas and Florida, they add, the provinces of the brothers Bush; now that the most aggressively pro-death of them is president, the authors conclude, the time has come to insist, if not on the abolition ofcapital punishment, then on a national moratorium on execution. Eye-for-an-eye types will dismiss this out of hand, but anti-death penalty activists will find in it new arguments, calmly advanced, to support their views.