Capital Punishment and the Judicial Process

by Randall Coyne and Lyn Entzeroth

Book Overview

Capital Punishment and the Judicial Process provides comprehensive coverage of a number of issues, including the philosophical debate over the death penalty, constitutional challenges to the death... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0890895813
• ISBN13: 9780890895818
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Carolina Academic Press
• Length: 723 Pages
• Weight: 3.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

None better.

This book is the leading authority on capital punishment in the United States. I used this textbook in a capital punishment class taught by Professor Coyne, whose brilliance goes well beyond this book. To those who know little regarding the use of the death penalty in this country, this book is an eye-opening illustration of the most serious aggrievances of this subject. I would recommend this book to anyone who has an open mind, but especially those of you who don't.

legal information that a non-lawyer can understand

This is an excellent reference for the legal aspects of the death penalty. It covers constitutional limitations, state and federal habeas corpus review, the federal death penalty, and international aspects, all backed with case studies. This book is best used as a desktop reference; I would not recommend reading it straight through.

Letting injustice speak for itself.

This is an extraordinary book. There can be few legal casebooks that can be recommended to the general reader - but this is one of those books. Randall Coyne - Professor of Law at the University of Oklahoma, practitioner and erstwhile member of the McVeigh defense tean - and Lyn Entzeroth, his wife and a law clerk in the Oklahoma Court of Appeals - are a formidable team. The power of this book comes from its understatement - this is no abolitionist rant or jeremiad, rather the authors allow the unfairness, capriciousness and stony-heartedness of the judicial process in the imposition of capital punishment to speak for itself.The book is a pefect complement to Hugo Adam Bedau's The Death Penalty in America and deserves to be as well known as that text. Where Bedau presents the arguments for and against capital punishment through academic papers, Coyne and Entzeroth cover similar ground but mainly through judicial opinions.This book is de rigeur reading for any law ! ! school course looking at capital punishment but is sufficiently succinct and clear to allow the interesed lay reader or, one can live in hope, legislator to thoroughly inform themselves on all aspects of the topic. It really is a miracle of compression and the authors are strongly to be commended on the scope of their coverage and the neutral tone of their presentation. It has none of the stridency of tone associated with other high profile practitioner authors. It is difficult to imagine how one could read it from cover to cover and remain in favor of capital punishment.