"Nation states and communities throughout the world have reached certain decisions about capital punishment: It is the destruction of human life. It is ineffective as a deterrent for crime. It is an instrument the state uses to contain or eliminate its political adversaries. It is a tool of "justice" that disproportionality affects religious, social, and racial minorities. It is a sanction that cannot be fixed if unjustly applied. Yet the United States--along...

In a continuous monologue, former death-row inmate Nick Yarris tells the story of how he was charged with the murder of a woman in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, sentenced to death, and, after twenty-one years behind bars, exhonerated based on DNA evidence.

"There have been many heroes and victims in the battle to abolish the death penalty, and Marie Deans fits into both of those categories. A South Carolina native who yearned to be a fiction writer, Marie was thrust by a combination of circumstances, including the murder of her beloved mother-in-law, into a world much stranger than fiction, a world in which minorities and the poor were selected to be sacrificed to what Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun...

"A deeply reported, searingly honest portrait of the death penalty in Texas-- and what it tells us about crime and punishment in America. 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...

"In 1895, an Italian seamstress in New York was accused of killing the man who had raped her, promised to marry her, and was about to abandon her. Following a sensational trial conducted in a language she could not understand, Maria Barbella, at the age of twenty-two, became the first woman sentenced to die in the newly invented electric chair. Idanna Pucci tells this story with immediacy, passion and authority that no other author could have mustered,...

Sophie and the moonhanger: In the 1950s South, a woman is torn between her husband, the Grand Dragon of the KKK, and her black best friend ; Go tell it on the mountain: John has a talent for writing, but his father has pushed him towards a life of faith. As the two battle each other, they must also overcome their own personal struggles in the adaptation of James Baldwin's beloved novel ; Honeydripper: Tyrone Purvis will try anything to keep his blues...