"Confronting the Death Penalty probes how jurors make the ultimate decision about whether another human being should live or die. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative linguistic methods, Robin Conley explores the means through which language helps to make death penalty decisions possible - how specific linguistic choices mediate and restrict jurors', attorneys', and judges' actions and experiences while serving and reflecting on capital trials."--Provided by publisher.

'Confronting the Death Penalty' probes how jurors make the ultimate decision about whether another human being should live or die. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative linguistic methods, this book explores how language, including written laws and trial talk, affects jurors' death penalty decisions. By focusing on how language can both facilitate and stymie empathic encounters, Conley investigates theinterface between experiential and linguistic aspects of legal-decision making to address the moral conflict faced by jurors that is inherent to death penalty trials.

This volume explores the continued use of capital punishment in Asia and the reasons behind its retention. Various contributions offer insights into the politics, practice and public opinion of Asian capital punishment

Confronting the Death Penalty: How Language Influences Jurors in Capital Cases probes how jurors make the ultimate decision about whether another human being should live or die. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative linguistic methods, this book explores the means through which language helps to make death penalty decisions possible - how specific linguistic choices mediate and restrict jurors', attorneys', and judges' actions and experiences while serving and reflecting on capital trials. The analysis draws on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in diverse counties across Texas, including participant observation in four capital trials and post-verdict interviews with the jurors who decided those cases. Given the impossibility of access to actual capital jury deliberations, this integration of methods aims to provide the clearest possible window into jurors' decision-making. Using methods from linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, and multi-modal discourse analysis, Conley analyzes interviews, trial talk, and written legal language to reveal a variety of communicative practices through which jurors dehumanize defendants and thus judge them to be deserving of death. By focusing on how language can both facilitate and stymie empathic encounters, the book addresses a conflict inherent to death penalty trials: jurors literally face defendants during trial and then must distort, diminish, or negate these face-to-face interactions in order to sentence those same defendants to death. The book reveals that jurors cite legal ideologies of rational, dispassionate decision-making - conveyed in the form of authoritative legal language - when negotiating these moral conflicts. By investigating the interface between experiential and linguistic aspects of legal decision-making, the book breaks new ground in studies of law and language, language and psychology, and the death penalty.

An in-depth examination of what life under a sentence of death is like.

The 4th edition of this authoritative study of the death penalty, now written jointly with Carolyn Hoyle, brings up-to-date developments in the movement to abolish the death penalty worldwide. It draws on Roger Hood's experience as consultant to the United Nations for the UN Secretary General's five-yearly surveys of capital punishment and on the latest information from non-governmental organizations and the academic literature. Not only have many more countries abolished capital punishment but, even amongst those that retain it, the majority have been carrying out fewer executions. Legal challenges to the mandatory capital punishment have been successful, as has the pressure to abolish the death penalty for those who commit a capital crime when under the age of 18. This edition has more to say about the prospects that China will restrict and control the number of executions 'on the road to abolition'. Yet, despite such advances, this book reveals many human rights abuses where the death penalty still exists. In some countries a wide range of crimes are still subject to capital punishment, and the authorities too often fail to meet the safeguards embodied in international human rights treaties to safeguard those facing the death penalty. There is evidence of police abuse, unfair trials, lack of access to competent defence counsel, excessive periods of time spent on in horrible conditions on 'death row', and public, painful forms of execution. The authors engage with the latest debates on the realities of capital punishment, especially its justification as a uniquely effective deterrent; whether it can ever be administered equitably, without discrimination or error; and what influence relatives of victims should have in sentencing and on the public debate. For the first time, it also discussing the problem of devising an alternative to capital punishment, especially life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

The true story of a woman’s fight for her brother’s life—and her own: “Essential for those interested in the U.S. justice system” (Library Journal). On September 21, 2011, Troy Anthony Davis was put to death by the State of Georgia. Davis’s execution was protested by hundreds of thousands of people across the globe, and Pope Benedict XVI, Pres. Jimmy Carter, and fifty-one members of Congress all appealed for clemency. Davis’s older sister, Martina, a former Army flight nurse who had served in the Gulf War, was one of Davis’s strongest advocates—despite the fact that she was battling liver and metastatic breast cancer and died just weeks after her brother’s death by lethal injection. This book, coauthored by Martina and writer Jen Marlowe, tells the intimate story of an ordinary man caught up in an inexorable tragedy. From his childhood in racially charged Savannah; to the confused events that led to the 1989 shooting of a police officer; to Davis’s sudden arrest, conviction, and two-decade fight to prove his innocence, I Am Troy Davis takes us inside a broken legal system where life and death hang in the balance. It is also an inspiring testament to the unbreakable bond of family and the resilience of love, and reminds us that even when you reach the end of justice, voices from across the world can rise together in chorus and proclaim, “I am Troy Davis.” “Martina Correia’s heroic fight to save her brother’s life while battling for her own serves as a powerful testament for activists.” —The Nation “Should be read and cherished.” —Maya Angelou, author and civil rights activist