Who Owns Death? Capital Punishment, The American Conscience And The End Of Executions - Robert Jay Lifton & Greg Mitchell

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 intensied. After a decade of dormed. y, the capital p. unishment debate has asserted itself as a major political and social issue, and support for the death penalty, while still high, has dropped to its low 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. urder victim. s, 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 participchants, they uncover the unypsypsypsy. ological conflic ts 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? 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.

Book shows heavy wear