Bedau, Hugo Adam

Presents the arguments of seven lawyers, prosecutors, judges, and philosophers for and against the death penalty, and includes Illinois governor George Ryan's 2003 speech in which he commuted all of his state's death sentences.

A collection of forty readings on the pros and cons of the death penalty, with statistics and data, information on Supreme Court decisions, and an introduction that sketches the main features of capital punishment as it exists in the late twentieth-century.

The first five chapters of his book "explore in detail a variety of factual issues raised by the death penalty," . . . The last four chapters are concerned with constitutional and ethical issues. Here the author argues that the Supreme Court's arguments are not conclusive; many moral arguments used by opponents of the death penalty are less conclusive than their users believe; and there are reasons favoring the abolition of the death penalty even for the worst murders.