Hosts Cecil Prescod and Celeste Carey speak with Stephen John Hartnett about his book EXECUTING DEMOCRACY: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT & THE MAKING OF AMERICA.
Even the most ardent death penalty supporter doesn’t claim that capital punishment is a deterrent to crime. We know that it’s not. We also know that innocent people have landed on death row. But what else do we know about the death penalty, and about its fraught history in the U.S.? Tune in to find out more.
Stephen John Hartnett is professor at the University of Colorado and author of EXECUTING DEMOCRACY: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT & THE MAKING OF AMERICA, Volume 1 (2010) and Volume 2 (2012). He is an expert on the history of the death penalty in America, and he says that there’s plenty that we’re not taught about how it came to be and how the fight over it was so intimately tied to the social and historic forces that shaped the nation.
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