Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America's Future

(Hardback)

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With public opinion polls showing opposition to the death penalty at its highest level in twenty years, this timely book by two of America's most important civil rights leaders and the Nation's criminal justice reporter makes a passionate and persuasive case against capital punishment. Combining a powerful moral argument with recent, overwhelming evidence of systematic legal error and widespread racial bias in death penalty cases, Legal Lynching directly attacks the basic claims of thoseincluding our new presidentwho continue to insist on execution as a punitive solution for an increasing number of crimes. With the abolition of the death penalty in South Africa, the United States has become the last industrialized democracy to persist in state-sponsored execution.

Grounded in stories of those who were unjustly convicted and left to languish on death row, Legal Lynching is a moving, human book by America's leading death penalty abolitionists.

Author Bio

Reverend Jesse L. Jackson Sr. ran for president of the United States in 1984 and 1988. He is the founder and president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.

Jesse L. Jackson, Jr. represented the second congressional district of Illinois in the United States Congress from 1995 to 2012. He is a co-author (with Reverend Jesse Jackson and Bruce Shapiro) of Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and Americas Future (The New Press).

Bruce Shapiro is a contributing editor at the Nation, and national correspondent for Salon.com.