The Viewing Room: How Journalists Prepare for and Respond to Witnessing Executions discusses the need for individual and organizational journalism training on coping with trauma exposure and providing support after being exposed to trauma, specifically as it pertains to the aftermath of witnessing and covering executions. The United States executed 46 people in 2010. At least one journalist witnessed each of the deaths. Thirty-three of those journalists were interviewed for this book. They witnessed an electrocution, firing squad death or a lethal injection, with some having witnessed more than one execution that year by the time they were interviewed. Kenna R. Griffin argues that support before and after trauma exposure would help journalists cope with emotions related to experiencing traumatic events, and could even help them avoid emotional trauma altogether. It is newsroom managers’ responsibility to create supportive work environments with climates focused on education, training, communication, safety, and emotional well-being—most of which don’t appear to be present when journalists witness executions, and all of which are necessary to create a more mentally healthy profession. Scholars of journalism, trauma, and legal studies will find this book particularly useful.

Gabriela Polit Dueñas analyzes the work of five narrative journalists from three countries. Marcela Turati, Daniela Rea, and Sandra Rodriguez from Mexico, Patricia Nieto from Colombia, and María Eugenia Ludueña from Argentina produce compelling literary works, but also work under dangerous, intense conditions. What drives and shapes their stories are their affective responses to the events and people they cover. The book offers an insightful analysis of the emotional challenges, the stress and traumatic conditions journalists face when reporting on the region’s most pressing problems. It combines ethnographic observations of the journalists’ work, textual analysis, and a theoretical reflection on the ethical dilemmas journalists confront on a daily basis. Unwanted Witnesses puts forward a necessary discussion about the place contemporary journalists occupy in the field of production, and how the risks they run speak directly about the limits of our democracies.

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A deeply reported, searingly honest portrait of the death penalty in Texas—and what it tells us about crime and punishment in America “If you’re one of those people who despair that nothing changes, and dream that something can, this is a story of how it does.”—Anand Giridharadas, The New York Times Book Review WINNER OF THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS AWARD In 1972, the United States Supreme Court made a surprising ruling: the country’s death penalty system violated the Constitution. The backlash was swift, especially in Texas, where executions were considered part of the cultural fabric, and a dark history of lynching was masked by gauzy visions of a tough-on-crime frontier. When executions resumed, Texas quickly became the nationwide leader in carrying out the punishment. Then, amid a larger wave of criminal justice reform, came the death penalty’s decline, a trend so durable that even in Texas the punishment appears again close to extinction. In Let the Lord Sort Them, Maurice Chammah charts the rise and fall of capital punishment through the eyes of those it touched. We meet Elsa Alcala, the orphaned daughter of a Mexican American family who found her calling as a prosecutor in the nation’s death penalty capital, before becoming a judge on the state’s highest court. We meet Danalynn Recer, a lawyer who became obsessively devoted to unearthing the life stories of men who committed terrible crimes, and fought for mercy in courtrooms across the state. We meet death row prisoners—many of them once-famous figures like Henry Lee Lucas, Gary Graham, and Karla Faye Tucker—along with their families and the families of their victims. And we meet the executioners, who struggle openly with what society has asked them to do. In tracing these interconnected lives against the rise of mass incarceration in Texas and the country as a whole, Chammah explores what the persistence of the death penalty tells us about forgiveness and retribution, fairness and justice, history and myth. Written with intimacy and grace, Let the Lord Sort Them is the definitive portrait of a particularly American institution.

A seminal work and examination of the psychopathology of journalism. Using a strange and unprecedented lawsuit by a convicted murder againt the journalist who wrote a book about his crime, Malcolm delves into the always uneasy, sometimes tragic relationship that exists between journalist and subject. Featuring the real-life lawsuit of Jeffrey MacDonald, a convicted murderer, against Joe McGinniss, the author of Fatal Vision. In Malcolm's view, neither journalist nor subject can avoid the moral impasse that is built into the journalistic situation. When the text first appeared, as a two-part article in The New Yorker, its thesis seemed so radical and its irony so pitiless that journalists across the country reacted as if stung. Her book is a work of journalism as well as an essay on journalism: it at once exemplifies and dissects its subject. In her interviews with the leading and subsidiary characters in the MacDonald-McGinniss case -- the principals, their lawyers, the members of the jury, and the various persons who testified as expert witnesses at the trial -- Malcolm is always aware of herself as a player in a game that, as she points out, she cannot lose. The journalist-subject encounter has always troubled journalists, but never before has it been looked at so unflinchingly and so ruefully. Hovering over the narrative -- and always on the edge of the reader's consciousness -- is the MacDonald murder case itself, which imparts to the book an atmosphere of anxiety and uncanniness. The Journalist and the Murderer derives from and reflects many of the dominant intellectual concerns of our time, and it will have a particular appeal for those who cherish the odd, the off-center, and the unsolved.

IN 12 YEARS, MICHELLE LYONS WITNESSED NEARLY 300 EXECUTIONS. First as a reporter and then as a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Michelle was a frequent visitor to Huntsville's Walls Unit, where she recorded and relayed the final moments of death row inmates' lives before they were put to death by the state. Michelle was in the death chamber as some of the United States' most notorious criminals, including serial killers, child murderers and rapists, spoke their last words on earth, while a cocktail of lethal drugs surged through their veins. Michelle supported the death penalty, before misgivings began to set in as the executions mounted. During her time in the prison system, and together with her dear friend and colleague, Larry Fitzgerald, she came to know and like some of the condemned men and women she saw die. She began to query the arbitrary nature of the death penalty and ask the question: do executions make victims of all of us? An incredibly powerful and unique look at the complex story of capital punishment, as told by those whose lives have been shaped by it, Death Row: The Final Minutes is an important take on crime and punishment at a fascinating point in America's political history.

EDGAR AWARD FINALIST • A private investigator revisits the case that has haunted her for decades and sets out on a deeply personal quest to sort truth from lies. CLUE AWARD FINALIST • “[A] haunting memoir, which also unfolds as a gripping true-crime narrative . . . This is a powerful, unsettling story, told with bracing honesty and skill.”—The Washington Post A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • One of Marie Claire’s Ten Best True Crime Books of the Year Ellen McGarrahan was a young journalist for The Miami Herald in 1990 when she witnessed the botched execution of convicted killer Jesse Tafero: flames and smoke and three jolts of the electric chair. When evidence later emerged casting doubt on Tafero’s guilt, McGarrahan found herself haunted by his fiery death. Had she witnessed the execution of an innocent man? Decades later, McGarrahan, now a successful private investigator, is still gripped by the mystery and infamy of the Tafero case, and decides she must investigate it herself. Her quest will take her around the world and deep into the harrowing heart of obsession, and as questions of guilt and innocence become more complex, McGarrahan discovers she is not alone in her need for closure. For whenever a human life is taken by violence, the reckoning is long and difficult for all. A rare and vivid account of a private investigator’s real life and a classic true-crime tale, Two Truths and a Lie is ultimately a profound meditation on truth, grief, complicity, and justice.

A provocative, comprehensive history of American executions from colonial days to the present.