Customer Reviews

The Rope, The Chair, and the Needle: Capital Punishment in Texas, 1923-1990

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A very concise research on the direct development of capital punishment from legal and illegal lynchings to today's practice of executions in the South of the United States with focus on Texas. The authors show that the victims of this system have always been people of mediocre education with little or no financial means at all. In addition to that they show how the system of exclusion works: "The source of this southern concentration of both illegal lynchings and state-sanctioned executions is rooted in a cultural readiness to engage in what we would call a logic of exclusion."

The dominant group of people caught in this system were African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Asians, Native Americans, and southern European ethnic minorities,as well as poor Whites, thus representing a group of "excluded" people from the rest of society.

The study has been done with accuracy and a lot of background knowledge, giving the reader an insight not only into today's legal system and its history in the United States, but also into social conditions and attitudes observed in the period between 1819 and 1990. A very valuable book for everybody interested in knowing about roots and development of Capital Punishment in Texas and the USA. An extensive bibliography at the end of the book gives the reader a possibility to make further studies on the subject.