A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays

by Marc Bookman The New Press 5/11/2021, hardcover SKU:  9781620976548   Powerful, wry essays offering modern takes on a primitive practice, from one of our most widely read death penalty abolitionists As Ruth Bader Ginsburg has noted, people who are well represented at trial rarely get the death penalty. But as Marc Bookman shows in a dozen brilliant essays, the problems with capital punishment run far deeper than just bad representation. Exploring prosecutorial misconduct, racist judges and jurors, drunken lawyering, and executing the innocent and the mentally ill, these essays demonstrate that precious few people on trial for their lives get the fair trial the Constitution demands. Today, death penalty cases continue to capture the hearts, minds, and eblasts of progressives of all stripes--including the rich and famous (see Kim Kardashian's advocacy)--but few people with firsthand knowledge of America's "injustice system" have the literary chops to bring death penalty stories to li