From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State

Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. (Editor) Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. is the Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. He is the author of All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education (WW Norton and Company, 2004) and Co-Author of From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America.Austin Sarat (Editor) Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He has written or edited dozens of books, including Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Humane Execution (Stanford 2022), Law's Infamy: Understanding the Canon of Bad Law (NYU 2021), and Cause Lawyering and the State in a Global Era (Oxford 2001), which won the 2004 Reginald Heber Smith Book Award.

Ogeltree and Sarat combine the most severe criminal punishment with the bugaboo of racial class and prejudice in their book From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State. The professors astutely note that the death penalty is often used as a club to keep poor and desperate minorities in line in the larger white society. (Black Issues Book Review) The authors give the nation an unflinching view of the shameful influence of racism in death penalty cases. This is a must read for anyone who cares about fairness in application of the death penalty and respect for the rule of law in our modern society. - Senator Edward M. Kennedy Expertly dissects the racist underpinnings of capital punishment while pushing some intellectual boundaries. (International Socialist Review) Professors Charles Ogletree and Austin Sarat gather an impressive lineup between racial politics in America and the killing of African-Americans. (Harvard Law Review) An elegant compendium of essays written by sociologists, historians, criminologists, and lawyers. The essays starkly reveal how this country's death penalty has its roots in lynchings, and how it operates to sustain a racist agenda. (The Federal Lawyer)

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., and Austin SaratPart I : The Meaning and Signi?cance of Race in the Culture of Capital Punishment1 Capital Punishment as Legal Lynching? Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn2 Making Race Matter in Death Matters Charles J. Ogletree, Jr.3 Traces of Slavery: Race and the Death Penalty in Historical Perspective Stuart BannerPart II : Race and the Death Penalty Process4 The Role of Victim's Race and Geography on Death Sentencing: Some Recent Data from Illinois Michael L. Radelet and Glenn L. Pierce5 Death in "Whiteface": Modern Race Minstrels, O?cial Lynching, and the Culture of American Apartheid Benjamin Fleury-Steiner6 Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Life-and-Death Decision Making: Lessons from Laypersons in an Experimental Setting Mona LynchPart III : Race, Politics, and the Death Penalty7 Discrimination, Death, and Denial: The Tolerance of Racial Discrimination in In?iction of the Death Penalty Stephen B. Bright8 The Rhetoric of Race in the "New Abolitionism" Austin SaratContributors Index