Customer Reviews

Encyclopedia of Capitol Punishment in the United States

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This legal resource book, published in 2001 and revised for January 2008, presents detailed statistical facts and legal precedents regarding capital punishment in the United States of America, one of the few nations in the world which actually kills people as part of its legal system, despite a clear and consitutional prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment." What could be more cruel and unusual than the taking of a human life?

The December 18, 2007 United Nations resolution calling for an absolute moratorium on executing anyone else prayerfully makes such a resource obsolete. This book has the potential of being an excellent resource in the hands of a skilled defense lawyer struggling to keep a client off death row; hopefully the new UN resolution passed overwhelmingly despite US opposition will make this difficult feat of lawyering unecessary.

It is interesting to note that one impetus worldwide for this moratorium was Catholic organizations such as the Community of Sant'Egidio and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. Pope John Paul II, well respected moral authority worldwide, declared the death penalty both "cruel and unnecessary" in his 1999 encyclical The Gospel of Life: Evangelium Vitae and the cases for its just application "very rare, if not practically nonexistent." WE may find further presentation on the development of the moral theology of Pope John Paul II presented in the work by American Catholic priest and influential and authoritative professor of moral theology, the Reverend Father Charles Curran in his work John Paul II and Moral Theology (Readings in Moral Theology). Kindly read as well the great American Catholic spokeswoman on this issue, Sister Helen Prejean, particularly in her well-known Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account Of The Death Penalty In The United States and her other writings.

The president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Cardinal Renato Martino, definitively declared in late November 2007, briefly before the adoption by the UN of this global moratorium on capital punishment, that "the death penalty is homicide." This should answer the triflings of those seeking a governmental loophole in the divine, primordial and absolute commandment "Thou shalt not kill." who wished to alter it to read "Thou shalt not commit homicide." as the Catholic Church has now officially declared the death penalty as in itself murder.

Already in this past year we have seen individual states in the USA initiate or continue their own moratoriums on the death penalty including based on statistical gender and racial research such as that presented in this book. This book remains an excellent tool therefore in the ungoing struggle against the barbaric, counterproductive, immoral and unjust death penalty, as it presents drily the facts in these cases, and the legal precedents which have evolved over the centuries. May we find soon coming a total and a complete and a permanent outlawing of the death penalty in all of these United States, in all of its territories and in all of its holdings, both formal and informal, for all time to come.