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Over the past three decades, the United States has embraced the death penalty with tenacious enthusiasm. While most of those countries whose legal systems and cultures are normally compared to the United States have abolished capital punishment, the United States continues to employ this ultimate tool of punishment. The death penalty has achieved an unparalleled prominence in America's public life and left an indelible imprint on politics and culture. It has also provoked intense scholarly debate, much of it devoted to explaining the roots of American exceptionalism. This book takes a different approach to the issue by examining the historical and theoretical assumptions that have underpinned the discussion of capital punishment in the United States today. At various times the death penalty has been portrayed as an anachronism, an inheritance, or an innovation, with little reflection on the consequences that flow from the choice of words. This book represents an effort to restore the sense of capital punishment as a question caught up in history. The chapters pursue different strategies for unsettling the usual terms of the debate. In particular, the chapters use comparative and historical investigations of both Europe and America in order to cast fresh light on familiar questions about the meaning of capital punishment.

In 1988, Manhattan US Attorney Rudolph Giuliani brought a massive civil racketeering suit against the leadership of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), at the time possibly the most corrupt union in the world. The lawsuit charged that the mafia had operated the IBT as a racketeering enterprise for decades, systematically violating the rights of members and furthering the interests of organized crime. On the eve of trial, the parties settled the case, and twenty years later, the trustees are still on the job. This book is an in-depth study of the US v. IBT, beginning with Giuliani's lawsuit and the politics surrounding it, and continuing with an incisive analysis of the controversial nature of the ongoing trusteeship. The book addresses the larger question of the limits of legal reform in the American labor movement and the appropriate level of government involvement.

The pardon is an act of mercy, tied to the divine right of kings. Why did New York retain this mode of discretionary justice after the Revolution? And how did the advent of the penitentiary and the introduction of parole transform governors’ use of their prerogative? This book answers these questions by mining previously unexplored evidence held in official pardon registers, clemency case files, reports of prisoner aid associations, and parole hearing records. This is the first work of history to analyze mercy and parole through the same lens, as related but distinct forms of discretionary decision making. It draws on governors’ public papers and private correspondence to probe their approach to clemency, and it uses qualitative and quantitative methods to profile petitions for mercy, highlighting controversial cases that stirred public debate. Political pressure to render the use of discretion more certain and less personal grew stronger over the nineteenth century, peaking during state constitutional conventions, and it reached its height in the Progressive Era. Yet, New York’s legislators left the power to pardon in the governor’s hands, where it remains today. Unlike previous works that describe parole as the successor to the pardon, this book argues that reliance upon and faith in discretion has proven remarkably resilient, even in the state that led the world toward penal modernity.

The U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay has long been synonymous with torture, secrecy, and the abuse of executive power. It has come to epitomize lawlessness and has sparked protracted legal battles and political debate. For too long, however, Guantánamo has been viewed in isolation and has overshadowed a larger, interconnected global detention system that includes other military prisons such as Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, secret CIA jails, and the transfer of prisoners to other countries for torture. Guantánamo is simply—and alarmingly—the most visible example of a much larger prison system designed to operate outside the law. This book examines the rise of the U.S.-run global detention system that emerged after 9/11 and the efforts to challenge it through habeas corpus (a petition to appear in court to claim unlawful imprisonment). The book gives an insider's view of the detention of “enemy combatants” and an accessible explanation of the complex forces that keep these systems running. In the age of terrorism, some argue that habeas corpus is impractical and unwise. The book advocates that it remains the single most important check against arbitrary and unlawful detention, torture, and the abuse of executive power.

Despite increasing racial tolerance and national diversity, neighborhood segregation remains a very real problem in cities across America. Scholars, government officials, and the general public have long attempted to understand why segregation persists despite efforts to combat it, traditionally focusing on the issue of “white flight,” or the idea that white residents will move to other areas if their neighborhood becomes integrated. This book expands upon these understandings by investigating a little-examined but surprisingly prevalent problem of “move-in violence,” the anti-integration violence directed by white residents at minorities who move into their neighborhoods. Apprehensive about their new neighbors and worried about declining property values, these residents resort to extra-legal violence and intimidation tactics, often using vandalism and verbal harassment to combat what they view as a violation of their territory. This is the first book to seriously examine the role violence plays in maintaining housing segregation, illustrating how intimidation and fear are employed to force minorities back into separate neighborhoods and prevent meaningful integration. The book provides a moving examination of how neighborhood racial violence is enabled today and how it harms not only the victims, but entire communities.The book not only enhances our understanding of how prevalent segregation and this type of hate-crime remain, but also offers insightful analysis of a complex mix of remedies that can work to address this difficult problem.

On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh detonated a two-ton truck bomb that felled the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. On June 11, 2001, an unprecedented 242 witnesses watched him die by lethal injection. In the aftermath of the bombings, American public commentary almost immediately turned to “closure” rhetoric. Reporters and audiences alike speculated about whether the victim's family members and survivors could get closure from memorial services, funerals, legislation, monuments, trials, and executions. But what does “closure” really mean for those who survive—or lose loved ones in—traumatic acts? In the wake of such terrifying events, is closure a realistic or appropriate expectation? This book uses the Oklahoma City bombing as a case study to explore how family members and other survivors come to terms with mass murder. The book demonstrates the importance of understanding what closure really is before naively asserting it can or has been reached.

This book offers a wide range of theoretical tools for conceptualizing the criminal justice system in general and this historical moment in particular, in which mass incarceration, the War on Drugs, police practices, the treatment of juveniles and the mentally ill, glaring racial disparity, and the death penalty (among other aspects) are all facing challenge. Each of the 14 original essays in this volume dismantles and reframes core debates over U.S. criminal justice: What sort of institution is our penal system? What work is done by rules, practice, discretion, and social hierarchy? How specifically do race and gender shape outcomes? What role do the Constitution and the Supreme Court play in constructing and preserving current practice? How does legal change occur? The essays are highly situated and interdisciplinary, bringing together legal theory, sociology, criminology, legal doctrine, and critical theory. The authors—all of them leaders and innovators in their fields—represent a wide array of perspectives, schools, disciplines, and backgrounds. Together, they offer readers the opportunity to develop a more profound understanding of our enormous, complex, and deeply flawed criminal system at this historic moment of opportunity.

American prosecutors are asked to play two roles within the criminal justice system: they are supposed to be ministers of justice whose only goals are to ensure fair trials—and they are also advocates of the government whose success rates are measured by how many convictions they get. Because of this second role, sometimes prosecutors suppress evidence in order to establish a defendant's guilt and safeguard that conviction over time. This book shows how prosecutors are told to lock up criminals and protect the rights of defendants. This double role creates an institutional “prosecution complex” that animates how district attorneys' offices treat potentially innocent defendants at all stages of the process—and that can cause prosecutors to aid in the conviction of the innocent. Ultimately, the book shows that while most prosecutors aim to do justice, only some hit that target consistently.

In recent years, the Department of Justice has resolved investigations of dozens of Fortune 500 companies via deferred prosecution agreements and non-prosecution agreements, where, instead of facing criminal charges, these companies become regulated by outside agencies. Increasingly, the threat of prosecution and such prosecution agreements is being used to regulate corporate behavior. This practice has been sharply criticized on numerous fronts: agreements are too lenient, there is too little oversight of these agreements, and, perhaps most important, the criminal prosecutors doing the regulating aren't subject to the same checks and balances that civil regulatory agencies are. This book explores the questions raised by this practice by compiling the insights of the leading lights in the field. The chapters move beyond criticisms of the practice to closely examine exactly how corporate regulation by prosecutors works. Broadly, the book considers who should police corporate misconduct and how it should be policed, and in conclusion offer a policy blueprint of best practices for federal and state prosecution.

At the start of the twenty-first century, America is in the midst of a profound national reconsideration of the death penalty. There has been a dramatic decline in the number of people being sentenced to death as well as executed, exonerations have become common, and the number of states abolishing the death penalty is on the rise. This book tracks this shift in attitudes toward capital punishment, and considers whether or not the death penalty will ever be abolished in the United States. The book attempts to answer the hard questions that need to be addressed if the death penalty is to be abolished. Will the death penalty end only to be replaced with life without parole? Will life without the possibility of parole become, in essence, the new death penalty? For abolitionists, might that be a pyrrhic victory? The book discusses how the death penalty might be abolished, with particular emphasis on the current debate over lethal injection as a case study on why and how the elimination of certain forms of execution might provide a model for the larger abolition of death penalty.