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Capital punishment. --- Murderers. --- True crime.

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"A provocative analysis of how Christianity helped legitimize the death penalty in early modern Europe, then throughout the Christian world, by turning execution into a great cathartic public ritual and the condemned into a Christ-like figure who accepts death to save humanity. The public execution of criminals has been a common practice ever since ancient times. In this wide-ranging investigation of the death penalty in Europe from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, noted Italian historian Adriano Prosperi identifies a crucial period when legal concepts of vengeance and justice merged with Christian beliefs in repentance and forgiveness. Crime and Forgiveness begins with late antiquity but comes into sharp focus in fourteenth-century Italy, with the work of the Confraternities of Mercy, which offered Christian comfort to the condemned and were for centuries responsible for burying the dead. Under the brotherhoods' influence, the ritual of public execution became Christianized, and the doomed person became a symbol of the fallen human condition. Because the time of death was known, this "ideal" sinner could be comforted and prepared for the next life through confession and repentance. In return, the community bearing witness to the execution offered forgiveness and a Christian burial. No longer facing eternal condemnation, the criminal in turn publicly forgave the executioner, and the death provided a moral lesson to the community. Over time, as the practice of Christian comfort spread across Europe, it offered political authorities an opportunity to legitimize the death penalty and encode into law the right to kill and exact vengeance. But the contradictions created by Christianity's central role in executions did not dissipate, and squaring the emotions and values surrounding state-sanctioned executions was not simple, then or now"--

Capital punishment --- Capital punishment --- Capital punishment --- History --- Religious aspects --- Catholic Church --- History --- Religious aspects --- Christianity --- History

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For years, American states have tinkered with the machinery of death, seeking to align capital punishment with evolving social standards and public will. Against this backdrop, North Carolina had long stood out as a prolific executioner with harsh mandatory sentencing statutes. But as the state sought to remake its image as modern and business-progressive in the early twentieth century, the question of execution preoccupied lawmakers, reformers, and state boosters alike. In this work, Seth Kotch recounts the history of the death penalty in North Carolina from its colonial origins to the present. He tracks the attempts to reform and sanitize the administration of death in a state as dedicated to its image as it was to rigid racial hierarchies. Through this lens, 'Lethal State' helps explain not only Americans' deep and growing uncertainty about the death penalty but also their commitment to it.

Capital punishment --- African Americans --- History --- Civil rights --- North Carolina --- Race relations

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"In 1895, an Italian seamstress in New York was accused of killing the man who had raped her, promised to marry her, and was about to abandon her. Following a sensational trial conducted in a language she could not understand, Maria Barbella, at the age of twenty-two, became the first woman sentenced to die in the newly invented electric chair. Idanna Pucci tells this story with immediacy, passion and authority that no other author could have mustered, since Pucci is the great-granddaughter of Cora Slocomb, the American-born Italian aristocrat whose ingenious advocacy saved Maria's life. The result is not only a crime story with all the fury and pathos of classic opera, but a perceptive study of an earlier generation's attitudes toward immigrants, capital punishment, and a woman's right to reject the role of victim"--

Crimes of passion --- Murder --- Trials (Murder) --- Capital punishment --- History --- History --- History --- History --- Barbella, Maria. --- Brazzà,

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"From Confederation to the partial abolition of the death penalty a century later, defendants convicted of sexually motivated killings and sexually violent homicides in Canada were more likely than any other condemned criminals to be executed for their crimes. Despite the emergence of psychiatric expertise in criminal trials, moral disgust and anger proved more potent in courtrooms, the public mind, and the hearts of the bureaucrats and politicians responsible for determining the outcome of capital cases. Outsiders of all types--drifters, the unemployed, the unconventional--were the first to fall within the radar of police who were pressured to catch culprits. Although the vast majority of convicted sex killers were white, Canada's racist notions of "the Indian mind" meant that Indigenous defendants faced the presumption of guilt. Black defendants were also subjected to discriminatory treatment, including near lynchings. Even prior to Steven Truscott's controversial death sentence for a sex murder in 1959, abolitionists expressed concern that prejudices and poverty created the prospect of wrongful convictions. Unique in the ways it reveals the emotional drivers of capital punishment in delivering inequitable outcomes, The Death Penalty and Sex Murder in Canadian History provides a thorough overview of sex murder and the death penalty in Canada. It serves as an essential history and a richly documented cautionary tale for the present."--

Capital punishment --- Lust murder --- History --- Canada --- Canada. --- Steven Truscott. --- capital. --- convictions. --- criminal justice. --- death. --- gender. --- history. --- law. --- murder. --- penalty. --- penology. --- psychiatry. --- punishment. --- sex crime. --- sexuality. --- wrongful.