Essays on the Punishment of Death

von Kat Bodrie, Jeff Hood

216 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

In 1844 a Boston minister sat down to end the death penalty by argument alone.Charles Spear gave sixteen essays to the task. He went at the gallows from every side. He counted the jurors who would not convict because conviction meant a hanging. He counted the men who watched an execution in the morning and killed someone by nightfall. He counted the innocent...the farmer hanged for murdering a niece who came home two years later, the immigrant hanged on the word of the woman who had done it, the man already on the scaffold when the murdered man walked into the crowd alive.Then he turned to the book his opponents kept quoting.Part II is where Spear does what few abolitionists have dared since. He takes the Bible away from the hangman. Cain committed the first murder and God marked him so that no one would kill him. The covenant with Noah is a prophecy rather than a command. The Mosaic code carried thirty-four capital offenses and no Christian alive would keep one of them. Jesus was himself executed under a law like ours.Spear died in 1863. The scaffold did not pass into oblivion. It is still here, cleaner now and more clinical, producing the same smell.This edition modernizes Spear's prose in full while leaving his argument untouched. Every author he quotes is preserved exactly as he quoted them. A foreword by Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood, an editors' introduction, editors' notes on the people Spear cites and a list of further reading place the book back where it belongs...in the hands of people still fighting this.

• Reihe: THE ABOLITION CLASSICS
• Themen: Gesellschaft und Sozialwissenschaften Gesellschaft und Kultur, allgemein Soziale und ethische Themen Ethische Fragen, Themen und Debatten Todesstrafe
• ISBN: 9798235435339
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 24.08.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Complicit Press