America's Condemned : Death Row Inmates in Their Own Words

by Dan Malone; Howard Swindle

• ISBN13: 9780836281989
• ISBN10: 0836281985
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-08-01
• Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing

Summary

With virtually every poll in America citing crime as one of the public's biggest concerns, in late 1994 and early 1995, the Dallas Morning News sent a questionnaire to every man and woman in the country on Death Row, asking some 75 questions about their crimes, their experiences, their attitudes, etc. The survey was drafted by the News with input from a veteran capital murder prosecutor, a Death Row appeals lawyer, a criminologist, a forensic psychiatrist, a Death Row warden and a former Death Row inmate. The paper received received more than 700 responses.The result is the first in-depth, comprehensive national survey of Death Row inmates. This book will be an expansion of the paper's four-installment series that appeared in 1997.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. 1
Prologue: A View from Death Row	p. 9
Faces of Death Row
A Life of Crime	p. 33
Purging His Murderous Past	p. 43
When the System Fails	p. 56
Lives Gone Awry	p. 69
Different Paths, Same End	p. 85
Causes of Crime
Playmates Turned Inmates	p. 103
Crimes of the Father	p. 116
Descent into Murder	p. 127
Insane and Condemned	p. 137
Meting Out Justice
States of Execution	p. 151
Twists in the System	p. 164
Not Guilty, but Not Free	p. 177
Living with Death
Carrying On in the Face of Death	p. 189
Inside Story	p. 206
Turning the Tables	p. 217
Authors' Note	p. 227
Acknowledgments	p. 231
A Survey of Death Row Inmates, August 1995
Survey Results	p. 235
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