Who Owns Death? Capital Punishment, the American Conscience, and the End of the Death Penalty - Hardcover

Lifton, Robert J.; Mitchell, Greg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0380974983 ISBN 13: 9780380974986

Publisher: William Morrow, 2000

Synopsis

Conflict and ambivalence have surrounded capital punishment in the United States for centuries, but only now have we reached a state of profound confusion. The execution rate has soared by 800 percent in the post decade and, of the same time, opposition to state killing--on moral, practical, and legal grounds--has intensified. After a decade of dormancy, the capital punishment debate has asserted itself as a major political and social issue, and support for the death penalty, while still high, has dropped to its lowest level in nineteen years. America is clearly ready to ask the question "Who owns death?"

In this timely book, Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, award-winning authors and collaborators on Hiroshima in America, take an unusual approach to the issue. By exploring the mind-sets of those directly involved in the death penalty, including prison wardens, prosecutors, jurors, religious figures, governors, judges, and relatives of murder victims, they offer a textured look at a system that perpetuates the longstanding American habit of violence.

Richly rewarding and meticulously researched, Who Owns Death? explores the history of the death penalty in the United States to explain how it has entered the American psyche. The authors probe changes in methods of execution, from hanging to lethal injection, considering what this search for more "humane" executions reveals about us as individuals and as a society. Through their interviews with participants, they uncover the psychological conflicts that complicate capital punishment, finding that those most deeply involved in the process reveal surprising doubts about, and even opposition to, state killing. In a controversial conclusion, the authors predict that executions in the United States will come to an end in the near future.

Powerful, passionate, and informed, Who Owns Death? is the right book at the right time. As citizens of the only Western democracy that sanctions state killing, Americans have to find a way to acknowledge simultaneously both the horror of the original murder and the wrongness of legal killing. This remarkable book shows the way.

About this title

Review

Capital punishment is popular in the United States: the public supports it overwhelmingly, skeptical politicians are afraid to challenge it publicly, and the execution rate continues to soar (it increased by about 800 percent during the 1990s). So authors Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell will raise eyebrows when they write: "We believe [capital punishment] will come to an end fairly soon." They're advocates of abolition ("We have opposed capital punishment for many years"), but they've tried hard to become dispassionate analysts on these pages. After four years of research, they're convinced that Americans are deeply conflicted on the issue rather than cheerleaders for death. "The public embraces the death penalty in theory, but in practice they look at it with an increasingly critical eye," the authors write.

Lifton and Mitchell begin by examining how three states--California, Massachusetts, and Missouri--handle the death penalty. In succeeding chapters, they provide a history of state-sponsored execution in the United States and describe the various ways the killing is done, from lethal injection (the most common form of execution) to hanging (yes, hanging--that's how Delaware, New Hampshire, and Washington put people to death) and firing squads (in Idaho, Oklahoma, and Utah). They also provide an in-depth look at the people involved in executions, from the criminals themselves to the families of murder victims to the folks in the criminal-justice system: prosecutors, judges, wardens, chaplains, and so on. The opponents of capital punishment often make the mistake of appearing to champion evildoers, either by denying their guilt or minimizing the harm they have done. Who Owns Death? avoids this fatal flaw (it is dedicated, in part, "to the families of murder victims"). Open-minded readers who want to explore what the death penalty really is--and Lifton and Mitchell think there are many more of these people than is commonly assumed--may walk away from it rethinking their own beliefs. --John J. Miller

About the Author

Robert Jay Lifton's books include The Nazi Doctors, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (winner of a National Book Award), and Destroying the World to Save It. He is the director of the Center on Violence and Human Survival at John Jay College and also teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0380974983
• ISBN 13: 9780380974986
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 270