| Description |
xiii, 260 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm |
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text rdacontent |
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unmediated rdamedia |
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volume rdacarrier |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Contents |
When Bundy buckles up -- From rehabilitation to retribution : "Inside your daddy's house": capital punishment and creeping nihilism in the atomic age ; "The respect which is due them as men": the rise of retribution in a polarizing nation -- Executable subjects : Fixed risks and free souls: judging and executing capital defendants after Gregg v. Georgia ; Shock therapy: the rehabilitation of capital punishment -- The killing state : "A country worthy of heroes": the old West and the new American death penalty -- Father knows best: capital punishment as a family value -- Epilogue: Disabling freedom. |
| Summary |
Daniel LaChance shows how attitudes toward the death penalty have reflected broader shifts in Americans' thinking about the relationship between the individual and the state. Emerging from the height of 1970s disillusion, the simplicity and moral power of the death penalty became a potent symbol for many Americans of what government could do, and LaChance argues, fascinatingly, that it's the very failure of capital punishment to live up to that mythology that could prove its eventual undoing in the United States. |
| Subject |
Capital punishment -- United States.
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Capital punishment. (OCoLC)fst00846392
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United States. (OCoLC)fst01204155
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| ISBN |
9780226066691 (cloth : alk. paper) |
|
022606669X (cloth : alk. paper) |
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